On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 02:09:55PM +1000, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
On 3/25/2018 9:34 AM, juan wrote:
Regardless, as far as I understand it, the problem is not speculative execution per se, but shitty implementations that don't take security into account. Because the engineers responsible for them are incompetent or/and corrupt.
It is hard to do speculative execution right - which is another reason why it belongs in the compiler, which is a lot easier to fix, than on the chip.
Other benefits of software (e.g. compiler) level occupation of the optimization space - lower energy usage (compiler pre-calculation of the optimizations which the hardware otherwise has to just guess at) and less complexity of hardware (again, either lower energy usage, or transistors which can be put to other functions).