
Archive of posts tagged: Architecture


A Primer on the Meltdown & Spectre Hardware Security Design Flaws and their Important Implications
As previously reported in the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blog, two major hardware security design flaws—dubbed Meltdown and Spectre—were broadly revealed to the public in early January 2018. These flaws are described in detail by the discoverers in research...
Hardware Security
Two high impact microarchitectural timing attacks were disclosed yesterday. (https://nyti.ms/2EOX03d). 10000 ft overview: This is a very intricate attack but the root cause is unflushed speculative state from the cache resulting in a timing variations. Apparently the...
SIMD Instructions Considered Harmful
In the process of writing a short introduction to RISC-V, we compared RISC-V vector code to SIMD. We were struck by the insidiousness of the SIMD instruction extensions of ARM, MIPS, and x86. We decided to share those insights in this blog, based on Chapter 8 of our...