Reply to post: Re: @ "And what would they do with recalled chips?"

Re: @ "And what would they do with recalled chips?"

Whatever they do with trash normally, I would seriously doubt intel would actually recall the hardware, they are much more likely to pay a set price for RAM, motherboard and CPU sufficent to buy an equivilent product from someone else.

My point being, they can't replace them with a "bug free" chip from their own product lines and there are currently no equivalent products from other manufacturers that aren't also affected.

I guess they could replace those Core i7 and Xeons with Pentium III chips or AMD Athlon+ chips from the turn of the Century. AMD multicore chips are out, ARM and SPARC chips are out, any powerfoul x86/x64 clone is out... So, what would you spend the money on?

The best Intel, AMD, Apple Qualcomm and the others can do is patch the firmware and give enough information to the OS vendors and application developers that they can do their best to protect their software from such attacks.

it is already shaken but irrespective of what happens to intel all your predictions about the end of the world if Intel disappear is just rubbish. There is emulation and they could implement everything that the CPU was supposed to do on other hardware, with options to turn security down if more accurate emulation if required.

You are forgetting the timescales. There is no magic bullet for this. Every chip designer is currently rushing around trying to get new designs into the pipeline. The problem is, that is a long pipeline, so there won't be any "Spectre free" designs for the next few years. It is something we will have to live with.

And I never said it would be the end of the world if Intel went down, I was just pointing out that, currently, there is no alternative to Intel, if you want a Spectre free design.

As to OS and apps then since they are mostly written in portable lanaguages then they should all move over to new hardware with minimal changes.

OS? Not really, a lot of it is still done in Assembler/machine code, even if a majority is written in C/C++ or high level, managed languages. But it is the low-level libraries that will need to be re-written first, before the rest can come over. That can take years, even with a big programming team to pick through those 10s of millions of lines of code and re-test everything.

Even something "trivial" on paper, like changing from Bigendian architecture to Littelendian architecture, would require a lot of work, you still need to review all of the code, whether manually or automated, to ensure you pick up every instance of Bigendian moves.

Applications are a little easier, but, for example, up until recently most of Excels macros and VBA was written in Assembler for performance. You aren't going to re-write that in a few weeks!

Again, this isn't about defending Intel, this is just pointing out, that currently, there are no "safe" chip designs from ANY of the major players that would be in a position to push out the required numbers of high performance parts. There might be some small players, with low performance chips, like the Eden x86 chips (32-bit) that might not be affected by Spectre, but that would set you back to turn of the Century performance and software, no modern Linux, no modern Windows or OS X, no PC with more than 4GB RAM...