It really is incredible to see that a third party apparently has discovered a genuine backdoor in a production CPU with completely independent research. If that's within reach for a standalone researcher, what secrets lie in well-funded organizations at the nation level?
Perhaps this will bring further mindshare to the RISC-V approach in the future?
Personally I'd love to see a CISC-V --- the world really doesn't need any more MIPS-lookalikes, and a formal spec of x86 would be extremely useful for everyone from emulator writers to maybe even Intel itself.
That would be nice, but I'm more hopeful in the immediate for openpower to gain widespread usage on the desktop. Google seems to be banking on it for servers, at the very least.
Isn't openpower not actually very open? At least with RISCV we can compete vendors while maintaining a compatible instruction set, I'm not sure how many people are going to produce openpower chips.
In the long term, I think you have a point here. It would be nice to have IBM not being the only producer of, say, the POWER15. In that sense RISC-V is substantially more open than OpenPOWER.
But parent was talking about in the immediate timeframe, and right now (and I predict for the next few years at minimum), if you want free(r) and ballpark performance class with x86, then you're going to have to play with POWER. I don't think ARM is there yet with respect to grunt and some ARM designs have some of the same concerns about creepy dark corners of the processor die. It's why there's a Talos II under my desk.
I wanted one of those, just couldn't justify the price. I've been toying with the idea of running Reactos or Haiku on an FPGA as a cheaper "you own it as much as possible" variant.
It really is incredible to see that a third party apparently has discovered a genuine backdoor in a production CPU with completely independent research. If that's within reach for a standalone researcher, what secrets lie in well-funded organizations at the nation level?
Perhaps this will bring further mindshare to the RISC-V approach in the future?