A Vision of Persistence
For decades, memory systems have relied on DRAM for capacity, SRAMs for speed and then turned programmers loose with malloc(), free(), and pthreads to build an amazing array of useful, carefully tuned, composable, and remarkably useful data structures. However, these...
Thoughts on ISCA44
The 44th ISCA just wrapped up. This year it was held in Toronto, which proved to be a great location owning in no small part to great local organizing and participation. I find attending ISCA to be the best way to quickly read the pulse of the broader Computer...
Freedom vs. Security in Computer Systems
Is it time to consider designing and operating computer systems with an “off-by-default” attitude to proactively defend against such attacks?
Democratizing Design for Future Computing Platforms
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has been working hard on various white papers over the past couple of months and slowly releasing them. You can see all of them here. Today, we highlight one paper in particular, called Democratizing Design for Future Computing...
Die Stacking is Happening
(This blog is written to celebrate the two-year anniversary for the worlds’ first commercial processor with die-stacking technology, which was released on 6/16/2015, as AMD Fury X GPU) Many of you who attended MICRO 2013 may still remember the keynote speech...
If You Build It, Will They Come?
All hardware companies face a conundrum. Should they build a riskier product that has a higher probability of failure, or should they continue the evolutionary trend of their current products? The safe thing to do, and one that many customers may ask for, is the...
HARDWARE 0-DAYS: PUBLISH, SELL OR HOARD? (PART IV)
What should vendors do when they discover that a hardware 0-day has been used to exploit systems built on their product? Some vulnerabilities may permit vendors to patch the vulnerability using microcode updates. For instance, a mitigation for the row hammer DRAM...
HARDWARE 0-DAYS: PUBLISH, SELL OR HOARD? (PART III)
What should academics do if they come across a hardware 0-day attack? Obviously, disseminate. But before the vulnerability is made public, it is important to responsibly disclose the vulnerability to the vendor to give them a chance to fix it. If the vendor determines...
HARDWARE 0-DAYS: PUBLISH, SELL OR HOARD? (PART II)
What should governments do when they discover a hardware 0-day? In the US, as a matter of policy, any vulnerability that is deemed to affect critical infrastructure is disclosed to the vendors by the government [VEP]. The government can hide vulnerabilities (and...Subscribe
