Want to see if your PC is susceptible to the Spectre attack?
Here's a little C program (compiler not included).
With minor tweaking I got it to compile with VS2008. And... yes, my i7-3770 (Win 7) is vulnerable.
Sweet.
Want to see if your PC is susceptible to the Spectre attack?
Here's a little C program (compiler not included).
With minor tweaking I got it to compile with VS2008. And... yes, my i7-3770 (Win 7) is vulnerable.
Sweet.
So . . . what about all the PCs currently for sale at Costco, Best Buy, etc.? Is everything on the market going to be recalled? Maybe not.
no, they can’t do it with a recall. it’ll take months (years? ) to get the fix into the next round of CPUs. and there’s no way to replace the millions and millions of CPUs already out there. they’ll update OS’s to work around the bugs.
they’ll update OS’s
to turn off speculative execution
which will reduce performance by some amount, depending on what you do
as nearly as I can tell, the ultimate fix might involve doing full address-protection checks on all fetch addresses before the fetch occurs. I’m not a good enough CPU architect to be able to predict if speculative execution will still be advantageous with all that added – making it go fast seems to me to involve large amounts of additional logic.
So one outcome might be that all the speculative execution complications melt right out of the processor designs, and they consequently get much smaller and simpler, but slower.
Hm. I was going to get a new computer in 2018 . . . wondering if overall prices will decline due to lessened demand.
yeah… i’m in the same boat.
And I, of course, bought a new computer in November.
I was reading that there wasn’t much out there in terms of exploits though… yet.
no, nothing yet. even thought that little C program demonstrates the problem, the real world is much more complicated than a little sandboxed proof-of-concept.