51–60 of 145 posts
As someone who isn't versed in computer hardware engineering, can nothing be done here? Why is it there is a new backdoor every few months? Is it an architecture issue, and we simply demand too much for too cheap? How do we lock this down?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What is unknown (pure speculation) is whether, for example, Intel CPUs come backdoored straight from the factory floor? There is also a third possibility, that some intelligence agency invested a ton of cash into finding abusable exploits in these systems giving them the same access a backdoor would provide. Also from the Snowden leaks, we know that they have programs with budgets in the millions into finding simila…
Budgets in the millions, eh? So two full-time engineers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what interesting things are in Apple's completely undocumented chips? There is that famous saying about known unknowns and unknown unknowns...
No more or less so than intel or amd. Or is the problem that the entire implementation is not public? Because even risc5 doesn't require that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what if it’s some of that fancy paper or a pen that records everything you write! Might need to manufacture your own pen and paper now...
Hold up there you don't know if someone's been tampering with the trees, you'll have to grow your own forest first
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No more or less so than intel or amd. Or is the problem that the entire implementation is not public? Because even risc5 doesn't require that.
That isn't true. AMD aren't great at it, but Intel publish thousands and thousands of pages of manuals. They don't have the secret sauce in them as per se but Apple literally will not publish jack shit about anything inside M1.
There's also the "unpublished" stuff that occasionally leaks here and there; not something which I suspect will ever happen with Apple, but you never know...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should products be fully documented so that consumers can make an informed decision?
Yes! God, I miss tge days when things actually shipped with manuals on how everything works. I have a fiew old pieces of hardware I keep manuals around for just to remind me of what the writing style is supposed to look like.
https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/downloa...
Now the question is "What does the microarchitecture really look like so we can write our own x86 microcode?"
The problem with microcode is that it’s specifically tailored to each specific microarchitecture. The microcode for, say, Skylake, won’t work on Haswell. And it definitely won’t work on any AMD CPU. Intel and AMD almost certainly have compilers/assemblers of sorts that handles turning the microcode assembly-of-sorts into the correct bits, but they’re not portable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. It's Windows vs Linux all over; I think Open is better, but Intel has never (AFAIK) pretended to do that. If a customer knows "Intel/Microsoft controls this", I personally feel like that's an acceptable tradeoff. And for people who find that unacceptable, there's Debian on POWER9. But if you're picking Intel, it's not like these opcodes change anything; we already have ME sitting there controlling the m…
Did they release specs so that customer could build their own ME to manage the CPU? That would be interesting.
The instruction in question looks to be encoded as 0f 0a. Which, sure enough, is missing from the official reference - https://files.catbox.moe/ktzqfg.png
Good thing Apple is moving to M1; no more of that Intel crap. and stick with AMD for Linux.