Re: Death of DRM on PC platforms??
A back-of-the envelope computation suggests that branch prediction might be doubling performance in processor-bound applications. If you think that microprocessor designs are complicated today, just wait until you see what comes out to try to claw back the performance losses.
But of course, it's pretty rare to have processor-bound code. The real bottleneck is almost always memory or IO. Caches are there to help with that, but it is the speculative loads & stores that really win here. And are creating most of these vulnerabilities. So we're talking pre- and/or post- buffers on the caches.
Complicated.
