ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs
These style of exploits remind me of "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" (2005) - <a href="http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm</a><p>> Chip designers are under so much pressure to deliver ever-faster CPUs that they’ll risk changing the meaning of your program, and possibly break it, in order to make it run faster.<p>> ...<p>> applications will increasingly need to be concurrent if they want to fully exploit CPU throughput gains that have now started becoming available and will continue to materialize over the next several years. For example, Intel is talking about someday producing 100-core chips; a single-threaded application can exploit at most 1/100 of such a chip’s potential throughput.<p>It seems the trend in programming languages is towards better concurrency support. But why don't we yet see 100-core chips? If chip makers had to forego all speculative execution and similar tricks, would that push us toward the many-core future?