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by thinkingemote 1684 days ago
I fully expect apples M1 chip to get a spectre type vulnerability at some point and then any improvements it had will disappear.
1 comments

M1 is vulnerable to Spectre (some variants at least) as far as I'm aware.

Any speculation around memory accesses will yield this.

That why the solution is to only allow speculation when it's "ok". M1 is believed to have a number of Spectre-esq security mechanisms built into it to determine just that. For example: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200192673A1

Also, In dougallj's code [1] the zero of registers should be superfluous so it is assumed the function below is needed to make the experiments run stably by claiming ownership of the registers as part of a general anti-speculation security mechanism.

static int add_prep(uint32_t *ibuf, int instr_type);

The M1 explainer [2] has lot of interesting ideas like this contained inside it.

[1] https://gist.github.com/dougallj/5bafb113492047c865c0c8cfbc9...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28549954