Bob wrote quoting Mark Hachman:
The whitepaper can not be considered a roadmap to the design of a Palladium-enabled PC, although it is one practical solution. The whitepaper was written at around the time the Trusted Computing Platform Association (TCPA) was formed in the fall of 2000; both Wave and AMD belong to the TCPA. And, while Palladium uses some form of CPU-level processing of security algorithms, the AMD-Wave whitepaper's example seems wholly tied to an off-chip security processor, the EMBASSY.
An EMBASSY-like CPU security co-processor would have seriously blown the part cost design constraint on the TPM by an order of magnitude or two. I am not asserting that security solutions that require special-purpose CPU functionality are not in the queue, they very much are, but not in the first phase. This level of functionality has been deferred to a second phase in which security processing functionality can be moved into the core CPU, since a second CPU-like part is unjustifiable from a cost perspective. Given the length of CPU design cycles and the massive cost of architecting new functionality into a processor as complex as a modern CPU, we may or may not see this functionality shipping. Much depends on how well phase 1 of the TCPA effort fares. --Lucky --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@wasabisystems.com