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To get spectre meltdown chip flaw1/22/2024 ![]() Add in that 1 or their two attacks is via SMT, I think ASi is probably pretty safe from this. I won't say this attack is impossible on Apple Silicon but as you say, it would be more difficult-probably much more difficult. Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernels virtual memory system. That complexity isn't there in the M1 or any Arm RISC system. Final update A fundamental design flaw in Intels processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug. I was reading as much of the white paper as I could understand without doing further research and my conclusion is that even if the M1 is using a micro-op cache, the authors are using the x86 ISA complexity as a way of detecting micro-op cache hits and misses. This is also one of the main reasons M1 has such amazing single threaded performance since it isn’t limited by the decoder. The x86 ISA should die already. Both Spectre and Meltdown take advantage of the ability to extract information from instructions that have executed on a CPU using the CPU cache as a side-channel. Micro-ops are fixed length and shouldn’t require much caching unlike Intel/AMD. CPU hardware implementations are vulnerable to side-channel attacks referred to as Meltdown and Spectre. Spectre refers to one of the two original transient execution CPU vulnerabilities (the other being Meltdown ), which involve microarchitectural timing side-channel attacks. The memory model of ARM makes these types of attacks more difficult. Since Apple's ARM SoC cores don't use SMT, it looks like they are safe from this. Someone with more knowledge of Arm CPU Architecture should chime in.Įdit: And apparently SMT (also known as hyper-threading) is involved. ![]() In general RISC CPUs have much simpler decoding so it is possible that micro-ops aren't cached at all or the cache structure is much simpler. It's related to a new feature AMD introduced with its latest architecture called. By exploiting the kernel in different ways, Meltdown and Spectre have the potential to allow intruders to get access to data previously thought completely protected. The caching of micro-ops is the source of this vulnerability. AMD has published details of a Spectre-like vulnerability that affects Zen 3 CPUs. As IT recoils from the Spectre and Meltdown chip exploits, companies face patches that are incompatible, leading to crashes, reduced performance and lock-ups. The kernel on a computer chip moves data around a chips various sections of memory in response to what command a user is carrying out. I know that Apple's Arm CPUs use micro-ops but I don't know anything about if or how they are cached. Intel and Microsoft on Monday disclosed a newly found variant of the Spectre and Meltdown security flaws, revealing another vulnerability in chips used in hundreds of millions of computers.
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