[Cryptography] Speculation considered harmful?

John Levine johnl at iecc.com
Mon Jan 8 06:35:36 EST 2018


In article <7f4174cb-b842-1314-587a-dd32711a81bf at symas.com> you write:
>> One of them is VLIW, or "Very Long Instruction Word," which exploits
>> deliberately explicit instruction level parallelism rather than implicit
>> (speculative) instruction parallelism. 
>
>Intel EPIC -> Itanium -> nobody liked that path.

There is room for debate about what was wrong with Itanium.

I know the guys who invented VLIW.  It speculates all over the place,
with part of the idea being that some of the work the long
instructions do is thrown away if it turns out that it's on a path
that turns out not to be taken.  I have no idea whether its flavor of
speculation can be used for the same kind of attacks.

R's,
John


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