Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities [LWN.net]

Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 11, 2023 0:23 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities by roc
Parent article: Another round of speculative-execution vulnerabilities

> That's fine, but most people find some Web sites and phone apps useful, and those need high single-thread performance.

Nope. Not even close. Web sites would be equally sluggish no matter how many speculations your CPU does simply because there are no one who may care to make them fast.

If speculations would have been outlawed 10 or 20 years ago and all we had would have been fully in-order 80486 100MHz… they would have worked with precisely the same speed they work today on 5GHz CPUs.

The trick is that it's easy to go from sluggish website on 80486 100MHz device to sluggish web site on 5GHz device, but it's not clear how you can go back and if that's even possible at all.