Re: DanielBarker Re: Arm A53
".....So, it seems, is Intel Itanium....." There is a good information in
this explanation by Theresa Degroote at Secure64 of why Itanium's EPIC architecture is immune to Spectre and Meltdown. But it's unlikely that Intel will be shoe-horning Itanium's EPIC architecture into a Xeon package, or that anyone will be rushing out to replace all their Xeon servers with existing Itanium ones. The problem is - and always has been for Itanium - that it's architecture is more expensive to fabricate than x86-64. It would be pretty trivial for Microsoft to get Windows Server 2016 booting on Itanium, it's just would Microsoft be bothered to? Getting the OS to boot is just one problem, after that you have to get all your applications rewritten for the Itanium version of Windows, or accept the probable performance hit of x86-64 emulation on Itanium. After all, the OS and app vendors can simply wait for Intel to temporarily gin up the current Xeon designs with a die-shrink performance boost to alleviate any Spectre fix hit, a temporary cover until the next generation of Spectre-proofed Xeons are designed. Unfortunately for AMD, they seem to be right on the bleeding edge of die shrinkage, so their chance of recovering from Spectre fix performance hits is likely to be harder.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
