Revenge of the WAVEoids: Palladium Clues May Lie In AMD Motherboard Design

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Sat Jul 6 14:36:14 PDT 2002


At 10:07 PM 06/26/2002 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:
>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.

Compared to the cost of rewriting Windows to have a infrastructure
that can support real security?  Maybe, but I'm inclined to doubt it,
especially since most of the functions that an off-CPU security
co-processor can successfully perform are low enough performance that
they could be done on a PCI or PCMCIA card, without requiring motherboard 
space.
I suppose the interesting exception might be playing video,
depending on how you separate functions.

(Obviously the extent of redesign is likely to be much smaller in the
NT-derived Windows versions than the legacy Windows3.1 derivatives that
MS keeps foisting upon consumers.  Perhaps XP Amateur is close enough to
a real operating system for the kernel to be fixable?)

>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.





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