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Vaporware does tend to be pretty bug-free.

Not really. :) The Mill has bugs at many levels from design to implementation both in software and hardware. It's even in the linked paper: "A code generator bug exposing a software vulnerability akin to Spectre variant 1 has been resolved with a bug fix, without hardware modifications."

What part of the paper do you take issue with?

Can you point to a specific design feature in the linked paper (or in any of the talks on the Mill CPU) that might be vulnerable?

> What part of the paper do you take issue with?

There exists no Mill CPU - just software models of it at best.

Do you not think it's reasonable to believe that the Mill is immune to these flaws without hardware given the information presented in this paper?

It is plausible, but without having a concrete CPU on which independent researchers are able to do independent tests I am rather cautious.

Intel, AMD and ARM also claimed that the branch prediction on their CPUs cannot in practise be used to generate a side channel - Spectre proved otherwise.

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