[TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

[Bakul Shah]

On Jan 3, 2018, at 5:43 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at 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.

>  http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/133439/1/oh405rrs.pdf

This was a fascinating read! Thanks for the reference.