X86 dispatch contention vulnerability

juan juan.g71 at gmail.com
Fri Nov 16 12:14:53 PST 2018


On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 23:25:18 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:



> When I worked for Intel (1980-1982), a typical silicon linewidth was 3 microns.  (3000 nanometers.)  Recently I saw that Intel was using a 10 nanometer process, 300x smaller in linear size, and (300x)**2  (90,000) smaller in area.   What's truly amazing is how they have come to be able to etch such small feature-sizes on silicon.   For a long time, they were using 193 (?) nanometer UV light to do that, and yet they got feature-sizes below 50 nanometers. 

	Yes, that's interesting. At first I naively assumed that you couldn't print stuff smaller than the wavelength used but that's not the case at all. 


>(using a lot of photolithographic 'tricks' to do so!.)  Now, I think they probably use "EUV", short for "Extreme Ultraviolet", which amounts to soft-xrays, maybe at about 10nm wavelength or even shorter.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet     


	Yeah, the accuracy is impressive. Now, from a libertarian point of view, there's a huge accumulation of knowledge and 'capital' in the hands of very few people. Also, many of these  developments are govt subsidized in many ways and end up in the hands of a few monopolistic businesses. What this boils down to of course is the fact that the infrastructure is fully controlled by the enemy. 



> Hard-disk manufacturers probably characterize their platters in a similar way, looking for weak areas that have trouble recording data.  

	Yes, hard disks can mark and stop using bad sectors. Actually cheap  floppy disks controllers did the same thing...




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>                 Jim Bell
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