[Cryptography] Speculation considered harmful?

[Bill Frantz]

On 1/10/18 at 8:02 AM, nico at cryptonector.com (Nico Williams) wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 09, 2018 at 05:46:07PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>>Yet another problem with VLIW is that the optimizations tend to be
>>horribly architecture specific.  If you change the number of various
>>functional units, but you want to keep the instruction set backwards
>>compatibility, that's possible --- but if the compiler has to know how
>>the instructions will be scheduled, not only is it slow to compile,
>>but what is optimized for a particular version of Itanic might have be
>>terribe performance on a different version of the Itanic.
>
>VLIW == no stable ABI.  We'd have to ship bitcode and re-optimize,
>assemble, and link for every VLIW CPU model.
>
>It wouldn't be the end of the world.  But first we'd need the compilers
>that could handle it.

For people interested in new approaches to hardware 
architecture, the Mill might be interesting 
<https://millcomputing.com/> The Technology->docs/videos/slides 
page is a good place to learn about the technology.

Full disclosure: I worked briefly for Mill Computing on a sweat 
equity basis. I still have a claim on a small bit of equity. I 
stopped working because I didn't think I was contributing much 
of value. I still wish them well because they have interesting ideas.

Cheers - Bill

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