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

[Lucky Green]

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


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