[dogma1138]

Don’t know what they meant but it surely doesn’t affect the serverless model or PASS/IASS nearly as bad as Spectre.

Spectre is also much much harder to mitigate against Meltdown sucked but it was easily fixed and it will also be easily fixed in silicon Spectre especially variant 1 will be with us for a long time and no one knows what still is lying hidden.

AMDs main advantage is that none of the researchers really bothered reversing their branch predictor so none of the BP training reliant PoCs work on their hardware but there is nothing in their design that mitigates against Spectre specifically.

And judging by the guide they’ve released for how to manage branch prediction post Spectre at least the technical team is worried about what would happen when someone starts paying attention to them.

[paulmd]

Apparently their branch predictor doesn't alias the branch addresses, so it's much more difficult to "train" it in the fashion necessary for Spectre.

This would also be a pretty straightforward mitigation for Intel, so the whole "they need to redesign the whole core from the ground up!" thing may be a bit overblown. Cache behavior will need to change a bit, for sure, but we probably don't need to smash the looms and go back to using non-speculative ARM cores.

I tend to think AMD probably has some vulns lurking in their uarch as well, the difference is that Intel has a massive amount of marketshare in the server world and their hardware gets shaken down first as a result. I'm just a random internet nobody but Anders Fogh said the same thing in an interview with Gamers Nexus: Spectre is not much less severe for AMD than Intel, these are the opening shots of a whole new class of attacks and there are more to come now that we are looking for them.