On Jan 3, 2018, at 5:43 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
I'm highly amused by the irony. Intel throws bazillions of transistors at
these hyper-complex CPUs in an attempt to make them as fast as possible - and
(probably because of the complexity) missed a bug, the fix for which
involves... slowing things way down!
This bug appears to be the result of taking a shortcut rather
than complexity. I suspect this shortcut was taken consciously,
not realizing it could be misused. And the "Rowhammer" problem
is certainly not due to complexity but (again) playing close to
the edge -- the cell geometry is too small to not fail!
I wonder how many other bugs are lurking in these
hyper-complex designs?
Didn't anyone at Intel stop to think that complexity is bad, in and of itself?
They did try a newer architecture (itanium) but the market
rejected it. The same reason we still continue to use buffer
overflow inducing languages. Inertia & the cost of change.
This was a fascinating read! Thanks for the reference.