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Comment by pritambaral | Hacker News Reader

> and then suddenly someone discovered fire

This is not really like that. The dangers of speculative execution were known before, and, separately, the processor itself provided memory isolation capabilities. That the processor would ignore its own memory isolation principles when speculating about the next instruction to execute is a critical base of these vulnerabilities.

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So maybe a better analogy would be that they built fire retardant layers into buildings, but neglected the fact that heat could still pass through the layers and start fires on the other side without burning the layer itself?

Stop trying to make the analogy fit. It's not a good analogy.

Wouldn't a good analogy rather have the effect of rationalising what's already ridiculous?

Unlike "neglecting the fact that heat could still pass through the layers", speculative execution doesn't merely allow something that was previously possible. It allows something that was previously impossible, and while doing so undermines another, more critical, feature of the processor.

As absurdum, so that they could advertise the home being more efficient, faster to heat and less wasteful of the lucky phenomenon peculiar to their furnace design for running beyond the specification so instead of overheating one room, or expensive distribution, the furnace gets you really quick hot water and the excess energy isn't wasted, so compared to fully internally insulated homes, the benefits just keep adding up, e.g. installing plenum cable would be inefficient because this system dumps the excess heat quickly through the house, the ability to convect nicely preventing past occurrences of furnace fires. To be the most efficient inhabitant (kernel process) Intel recommends you enter and exit the over and under heated rooms frequently to manage your body temperature. This design is excellent for your hyperactive residents, please refer to our release notes for the use of rooms either exclusively or during long operations such as Netflix consumption.

The asbestos is working as intended as insulation/fire retardant. Sorry 'bout the mesothelioma.

This one's good, because, like asbestos, there's not really a good alternative to this on current platforms other than giving up some of the performance value of branch prediction in exchange for long-term safety. As far as I know, asbestos remains an unparalleled material for fireproofing, and it is still used sometimes under controlled conditions, even though we've been forced to accept other materials for general use.

AFAIK, mineral wools and silica fabrics have replaced much of the high temperature insulation that asbestos used to do. I believe they do the job just as well, but they're more expensive because they're manufactured rather than mined.

They made the wood fire retardand but it still burns - just not as easily as untreated wood - while selling it as fireproof wood.

A better analogy would be that they presented specs that showed that the building was supposed to be fire-proof but still insisted on dirverting from the specs and building best practices by cladding it with highly flammable material to improve its heating performance.

Now Intel has his own Grenfel tower.

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