Flaws in AMD CPUs.

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 3/25/2018 8:07 AM, juan wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Mar 2018 07:48:06 +1000
> jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
> 
>> On 3/23/2018 2:00 AM, Georgi Guninski wrote:
>>> On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 09:24:24PM +1000, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
>>>> The original CPU design was purchased from the US, but a variety
>>>> of chip makers have been improving on the design in a variety of
>>>> ways, so it is not US cloned, but is US descended - rather
>>>> distantly descended by now.
>>>
>>> according to the interwebz, your system is ARM based and in
>>> addition ARM is vulnerable to spectre. how many vulnerabilities
>>> like spectre affect the "US design"?
>>>
>>
>> The Orange Pi Cpu does not do speculative execution, therefore is not
>> vulnerable to spectre.
>>
> 
> 	I think some ARM processors do?

Possibly they do. There are a lot of Arm processors.  Pretty sure the 
new Samsung ARM processor does speculative execution, but I don't have 
any concrete information - it is just that they threw everything 
fashionable into that processor, or claimed to do so.

And if it does not have speculative execution, throwing everything 
fashionable into a processor is likely to result in some other security 
holes.

> 	Point being, it seems hard, even for the chinese govt, to know
> 	for sure that the system isn't backdoored by many of the
> 	western scum 'players' in the 'industry'.

Again, Orange Pi is all Chinese manufacture, plus western open source.

Hence I would expect all Chinese backdoors.

Speculative execution puts smarts on the chip that really belong in the 
compiler.  It is a bad design choice, the wrong way to do things, that 
was probably implemented to keep information in house, that they did not 
want to put into an open source compiler under the GNU license.

Had they done it right, would have had to put that technology into the 
GNU compiler, since everything has to run linux, or a linux derived 
operating system such as android, and thus had to license the technology 
to everyone.  And every other chip maker in the entire world would have 
been able to copy what they did, and adapt to their own architecture.