CPU hardware vulnerable to side-channel attacks

Side-channel attacks are notoriously difficult to prevent:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tempest_(codename)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tempest_(codename)</a><p>I suspect these sorts of attacks will exist as long as people try to share running untrusted code on the same hardware.

I wish desktop chips would trade a little performance for more simplicity and robustness. Even at half-speed, they are still pretty damn fast, and a lot of the bleeding-edge stuff was pushed over to the GPU a long time ago.<p>The economics are also a little off. If this were something like ARM64, the eventual replacement chip would be a few bucks instead of a few hundred. In that situation, I wouldn&#x27;t get too upset about it. It would be like, &quot;Oh well, I guess I have an excuse to upgrade my CPU now.&quot;

On one hand, great news for Intel: everyone needs a new chip. On the other, terrible news for Intel: AMD&#x27;s offerings are pretty competitive these days. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Maybe the CPU is the wrong place to perform sophisticated optimizations. IMHO, the CPU should be far more simple and the intelligence should be in the compiler.

I can&#x27;t figure out whether this means that OS-level mitigation of the problem doesn&#x27;t prevent all avenues for exploitation. The headline implies it (and probably made it to the front page based on that implication) but TFA doesn&#x27;t make it clear whether that&#x27;s true.

In the old days this would be no biggie as every non-trivial site would have at least half a dozen different kinds of Unix workstations anyway. SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, AXP, m68k, POWER...

so i bought my cpu a few months ago. will intel replace it for free?

this is our golden opportunity to switch to something less privacy evading and bug-ridden.<p>(and it will incidentally also prove that the market really doesn&#x27;t work very well, because most people will <i>still buy intel</i>)

Anyone know the implications to the security of the crypto currencies? Are they highly prone to theft now?

disable high resolution clocks for non-sudo programs?