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0 pointshinkley6y ago0 comments

We were talking about alternative CPU designs and a guy commented on how much of the volume of a CPU is memory these days.

I wondered aloud if it wouldn’t be better for use to embrace NUMA, make the bigger caches directly addressable as working memory instead of using them as cache.

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ulzeraj6y ago

I’ve heard somewhere that some or all versions of intel atom are immune to both spectre and meltdown attacks. The bonnell architecture being just a supercharged 486 has none of those fancy features that are being exploited. Not sure about foreshadow since HT is present on Atom processors.

dfrage6y ago

No out-of-order speculative execution, no bugs of this exact sort, expect maybe you'll find something in the odd corners of special features. As far as I know (don't follow them much) Atoms are based on the Pentium super-scalar architecture, which is a "supercharged 486" that allows the CPU to do more than one operation in parallel on different execution engines.

Per Wikpedia, "The Pentium has two datapaths (pipelines) that allow it to complete two instructions per clock cycle in many cases. The main pipe (U) can handle any instruction, while the other (V) can handle the most common simple instructions." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P5_(microarchitecture) )

HT uses two instruction decoders to keep more busy a set of execution engines, suppose you had the above set of 2 execution datapaths (that may be improved on these Atoms), and couldn't do two operations at a time from one instruction stream, but the other could use the unused datapath.

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