Intel has been adding features left and right where they can, and apparently the onchip memory controller is still simple enough to add more features to without performance hit. This is helped by memory being glacially slow compared to what happens in the CPU.
Biggest slice of Intel's x86 profits come from data centers (and that slice of pie is increasing), a major bottleneck of server workloads moving to "the cloud" is the lack of sound technical means to keep your data safe.
[1] Servers can use more cores but they can ditch the onchip GPU. GPU eats 4-8 cores worth of area in latest designs.
[2] Even in games, despite performance obsession and heroic optimization efforts, and pressure to squeeze most out of the ~8 cores in consoles: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/05/quadcore-gaming/
Agreed. Ultimately if Intel continues down this 'closed IP' route, their processor monopoly is going to be replaced with generic logic (FPGA-like processors) which will be dynamically programmable.
problem: what if my whole operating system is owned, right down to the keyboard interrupt handler? everything I do with this secure banking app is compromised.
okay, so instead what if I could put all the keyboard I/O, all the network I/O, the code, and the data, of the secure banking app into a trusted enclave, where the trusted enclave is cryptographically signed and verified from the BIOS up? now the OS can be totally owned but it can't read anything that goes on inside, or comes out of, this little enclave that's doing my banking.
that would be cool, right? now what if you could do that for all kinds of apps, like your email, and your web browser, and your key agent, and so on. and they're all in different secure enclaves that can't interfere with each other, and the host operating system can't reach in and touch their memory.
wouldn't that be cool?
What it does provide is protection against hardware attacks like memory bus snooping, or chilling and extracting DRAM modules.
The more code that goes into the box, the more opportunities there are for exploits. That's why it's important to put as little as possible in the box and make carefully defined interfaces to it.
iOS is supposedly cryptographically verified from the boot upwards, to inhibit jailbreaking of phones and people sneaking past the platform holder's tax, but it's not entirely hackproof. So it has an enclave within the enclave: an ARM TrustZone secure enclave running the sel4 formally verified microkernel.
Similarly hypervisor systems are trying to divide a system into segregated apps that can't interfere, but are vulnerable to (rare) hypervisor exploits.
It can't be crypto-turtles all the way down, there has to be a root of privilege. And there's always the hardware; have you seen how long the Intel errata list is?
Surely no consumer wants them
Some may have, but few - even in technical crows - are making fully informed decisions. Often, what is seen as a vote for modern technology is actually resignation* and felling powerless in the face of rapid changes.
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/publications/tradeoff-...
Intel and Microsoft et al[1] have been trying to lock down the PC for a long time. This is just the latest version of what used to be known as "Trusted Computing". You may have heard about it in the early/mid 2000s by the name "Palladium"[2].
Why? It's partly a very-misguided approach to "security" (which is often defined as security for the software vendor, not the owner of the machine, aka DRM), and this crosses over into the attempts at extending copyright into some sort of property right trump card[3], but this is really best described as the main battlefield in the War On General Purpose Computing.
General purpose ("Turing complete") computers are incredibly powerful, and that power scares a lot of people that are used to selling goods with single/fixed purpose (e.g. an "appliance"), and people that are used to being arbiters of a scarce resource (e.g. pre-digital publishing). The best description of this War is probably Cory Doctorow's incredible talk[4] at 28c3. Contrary to Doctorow's optimism that we would win this war, developments like SGX and Intel ME suggest we are actually losing ground rapidly[5].
It's easy to understand the desire to enforce DRM, but the problem is significantly broader, because as John Deere has shown us, these technologies will soon be in "everything". It's one thing to say you are going to jailbreak a phone or work around DRM on a PC. You may be perfectly fine with boycotting MPAA films. You may be fine with installing Linux or BSD in response to the Windows 10 fiasco.
However, remember how hard it's getting to buy a TV without the "smart" junk. It's going to be a lot harder avoid these problems when it's your car. Again I suggest watching Doctorow's even more important followup talk, "The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing"[6]. These problems need to be solved now, and we need to start establishing proper legal frameworks to protect user rights, because those rights are rapidly being appropriated.
There is a tendency among engineers to avoid political topics and to focus on on technical issues. That is no longer an option, because abstaining from this fight is de facto choosing to let the people trying to hide the General Purpose Computer where nobody can use it. There is no neutral ground when the world is burning[7].
"It taught us that we have to create the future .. or others will do it for us.
It showed us that we have care for one another, because if we don't, who will?"
- Ivanova (Babylon 5, "Sleeping in Light")
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...
[3] http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ (a well-known example)
[4] http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
[5] HN doesn't like to hear this - this is easily the fastest way I've seen to earn downvotes - but another big way we are losing the War On General Purpose Computing is the normalization of the "app store". Apple started this with the original iPhone (and later iOS in general), and now an entire generation of programmers think it's just fine that they have to ask a business for permission to publish their software. (jailbreaking doesn't count)
[6] http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y
I think the whole "security culture" is to blame for this. Very abstractly, security is about preventing someone from doing something you don't like. That combined with "default deny" turns into "everything which is not explicitly allowed is forbidden", and it naturally promotes locked-down devices where the user has no control. Users are conditioned to accept this because it's "for their security".
In these environments, one way to regain control is to find weaknesses in the security, e.g. jailbreaking/rooting. This is why I'm actually rather afraid of all the developments in "safer" languages and systems. Maybe some insecurity and imperfection, and accepting the occasional hack/leak due to it, is a good thing after all, if it means a path to freedom. I like to keep this quote in mind:
"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III#Controversy_about_...
Indeed. There's a fight for control of devices. Unfortunately the antonym of "secure" on the internet isn't "open" but "exploited"; the average consumer really is worse off if their computer is loaded with malware or a victim of cryptolocker.
I'm in the process of writing a longer thing about this at https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/pentagr...
It's a shame Google actively tried to push Intel chips in Chromebooks over ARM, when ChromeOS is virtually completely architecture agnostic, and that Microsoft killed Windows RT, too. If those things wouldn't have happened we would see Intel more in a panic mode by now, as "high-end" ARM chips start taking over sub-$400 notebooks.
Before you say "but Intel's chips are so much more powerful for $400 machines" - not they aren't. Intel has transitioned to using almost completely Atom chips (ARM chips' direct competitors) for sub-$400 machines and the OEMs went along with it, paying them ~3-5x what they would pay for an ARM chip of the same or better performance. All thanks to Intel's monopoly in PCs.