On Fri, 15 May 2020 at 09:12, Sreyan Chakravarty <sreyan32@gmail.com> wrote:

On 5/14/20 11:23 PM, Tom Horsley wrote:
> I mitigate by ignoring it:-). (Seeing as how there I nothing I can do
> about it).

It scares me to think that you might be right. Intel has really done
downhill.

Racing for the bottom against Boeing, except Intel has a longer history

of screwups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

Thunderspy negates a big Intel effort to secure Thunderbolt DMA access by external devices:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/thunderspy-what-is-is-why-its-not-scary-and-what-to-do-about-it/

According to security research Ken White [no relation]:

... both Apple and Google have managed to implement settings that block many Thunderspy type physical DMA attacks, including USB-C, from working against Macs and Pixelbooks, respectively. “Apple and Google device engineers seem to have anticipated this issue and have stronger IOMMU defaults and therefore expose their users to less risk.”

It is no longer possible to use their processors at maximum throughput
while ensuring data security.

Speculative (out-of-order) execution is hard. RISC-V doesn't use it.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/12/01/037236/risc-v-and-linux-foundations-partner-to-promote-open-source-cpu

Apple is expected to start selling laptops using their own chip designs. There are chip design groups at Google and Amazon.

Linux and MacOS have a big advantage in support for non-Intel architectures. The future seems to lie with many

simpler cores and GPU/vector processing units.

George N. White III