Is this libreboot friendly?
Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
71–80 of 80 posts
Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, given the territorial claims, yes, kind of that one. It just depends which government you believe as to whether the island of Taiwan is occupied territory, or everything else in China is occupied territory. And these are governments we're talking about, so, needless to say, both sides killed millions to make this happen. Not because those people that got killed worked for the other side or were doing anything a…
Whatever they claim, in the present time reality the RC (Taiwan) and the PRC are 2 distinct independent countries that are not going to re-unite any soon. "Believing" any of the 2 just doesn't make much sense.
Also, as far s I understand, the division has began as a conflict of 2 political parties - the leftists (CPC) and the rightists (Kuomintang) that has escalated into a civil war. And as the result each party now controls its part of what was once meant to be a single country and claims the right to rule both. What makes me curious is why can't 2 parties just control their parts the way they do in Taiwan and PRC but do it peacefully and without nonsensical claims when the people of one part are more sympathetic to one and the people of the other part are more sympathetic to the other. Why is it so important to have one party to rule them all, including those who doesn't want it?
Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
#73This is VIA Technologies. Details here: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/via-chinese-x86-soc-2019,36...
Ah, the old VIA chips, which VIA built from the tech they bought from Cyrix. If you're interested in the history of Cyrix and some of the older x86 compatible chips, here's a great video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWGAdoMz1c0 Also these Zhaonix's are just 32-bit right? I didn't seen anything on the site about supporting x86_64.
On their specs page[1], there's a row in the table for the instruction set, which is "x86 and x64(64-bit)".
Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
#74Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have spectre, any CPU with speculative execution and caches of any sort (excluding some capability machines, no ROP exploit machines and PLB enforced SASOS machines), including branch prediction (!) is vulnerable to spectre. (For those of you not in comp arch, that roughly translates to "literally every single non embedded CPU, and then some") That's what makes the flaw so deep and troublesome.
Is speculative execution actually worth it? Can't compilers do the job and optimize execution sufficiently so we won't need speculative execution? Anyway, "caches of any sort" sounds frightening: I can remember disabling all the caches on Pentium-3 to make it about as slow as 80386 so some ancient games that can't run on fast CPUs would run ok and be playable.
IA64 would like to reaffirm that this indeed worthwhile.
Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
#76which socket is it?
Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
#77I surprised most cpu chips don't have government back-doors in them.
Remember export-quality encryption? Yeah...
Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Atom? As I understood it Atom processors did not use speculative execution.
IIRC, the first generation Xeon Phi had cores very similar to Atoms too.
Those cores were a bastard child of P54C[0] cores with the beginnings of (though not instruction compatible with) AVX512 + 64bit support (original Pentium had neither of these). They were not like Atom cores at all.
The second generation Xeon Phi cores are pretty much based on beefed-up Airmont Atom cores.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P5_%28microarchitecture%29#P54...
Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
#79I surprised most cpu chips don't have government back-doors in them.
ARM Trustzone http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzon... AMD PSP http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/s...
Fixed URL: ARM Trustzone
Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the Mill architecture solving problems orthogonal to this?
The Mill doesn't do speculative execution, so I guess it should be safe from Spectre? It also doesn't have a normal TLB and a very different idea of memory protection, so perhaps it will be safe from Meltdown too. At the end of the day, though, Meltdown and Spectre are both consequences of all the caching between a modern CPU and main memory, so the Mill will likely need to at least be careful.
Nah, the Mill does branch prediction, so it will still be in trouble. The Mill also does speculative execution, not OoOE but still speculative via predication.