Today's hardware vulnerability: register file data sampling

Posted Mar 14, 2024 7:25 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Today's hardware vulnerability: register file data sampling by Heretic_Blacksheep
Parent article: Today's hardware vulnerability: register file data sampling

Bonnell (the in-order microarchitecture of the first Atom generation) is unlikely to be affected, because 1) it's completely different from the OoO microarchitectures used in later generations and, in particular, 2) it does not use register renaming, so there are no stale physical registers; all physical registers are architectural and directly readable.

The Silvermont and Airmont microarchitectures are between Bonnell and the listed Goldmont. Are there no supported products with these microarchitectures? My impression is that "Atom" cores are used longer in products than "Core" cores, and they might well be still supported.

Today's hardware vulnerability: register file data sampling

Posted Mar 14, 2024 10:33 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

Looking around a bit, at least the Silvermont-based Atom E3805 is still in the marketing status "launched" (rather than "discontinued"), so I would expect that Intel has checked Silvermont and that they think that Silvermont is not affected.

Concerning Airmont, I have not looked around until I found a CPU with Airmont that is still being considered in service, but Airmont is mostly a shrink of Silvermont, so it is unlikely to be affected if Silvermont is not; or in other words, it is more likely that they introduced this bug between Airmont and Goldmont than between Silvermont and Airmont.