Intel's "redundant prefix issue"
Intel's "redundant prefix issue"
Posted Nov 27, 2023 16:28 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341)In reply to: Intel's "redundant prefix issue" by farnz
Parent article: Intel's "redundant prefix issue"
I still think that, even without _any_ documentation, if the microcode were at least user-replaceable, there would be clever people out there - outside of AMD and Intel - who would start to reverse engineer at least some of its functions, and we'd get some useful things out of it. There'd be bored EEE students writing fuzzers, measuring the visible changes on x86 ISA, and mapping out at least some subset of the microcode to hit on something useful.
Posted Nov 27, 2023 16:35 UTC (Mon)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
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I'd certainly agree that people would reverse engineer the microcode and do things with it - I'm just not sure how I'd write that as a positive for Intel, since most of them will be aiming to either find a cool new vulnerability in Intel's designs, or trying to work out how Intel manages to be "better" than their preferred design at doing something.
We only got what we got for GPUs because Intel (and later AMD) needed something to get them design wins over the leading GPUs on the market, and the business case was that, while writing OSS drivers would help competitors reverse-engineer their designs, having OSS drivers would result in them getting sales to customers who see OSS drivers as a positive - and with ATI and nVidia winning (for Intel) and later nVidia dominating over AMD, they valued those design wins over protecting themselves from reverse-engineering. And this was especially clear since people could, and did, reverse engineer nVidia's closed drivers because they had documentation for the CPUs they ran on, even though they didn't have documentation for the GPUs.
Intel's "redundant prefix issue"