Comment by DCKing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DCKing | Hacker News Reader

The A510 small core is really the big news here for me. ARM updates their small core architecture very infrequently and the small cores hold back the features of their big cores. Because of the Cortex A55, the Cortex X1 was stuck on ARMv8.2. The OS needs to be able to schedule a thread on both small and big cores, you see. And that meant ARM’s own IP missed out on security features such as pointer authentication and memory tagging, which ARM customer Apple has been shipping for years at this point.

The Cortex A55 (announced 2017) was also a very minor upgrade over the Cortex A53 (announced 2012). These small cores are truly the baseline performance of application processors in global society, powering cheap smartphones, $30 TV boxes, most IoT applications doing non-trivial general computation and educational systems like the Raspberry Pi 3. If ARM’s numbers are near the truth (real-world implementations do like to disappoint us in practice), we’re going to see a nice security and performance uplift there. Things have been stale there a while.

If anything this announcement means that in a few years time, the vast majority of application processors sold will have robust mitigations against many important classes of memory corruption exploits [1].

[1]: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/02/examining-poi...

Note that Apple only shipped pointer authentication so far, not memory tagging.

Memory tagging only will ship on ARMv9 products in practice, across the board.

Thanks for the correction. The Apple A14 and M1 implement the ARMv8.4 spec, whereas memory tagging became part of the spec in 8.5.

Those chips implement almost all of ARMv8.5, and this is what LLVM identifies them as.

Outside ARM world, SPARC has had hardware memory tagging for ages and it used on Solaris by default.

IBM s/370 (possibly even s/360) too had memory page tagging -- see instructions ISK / ISKE.

Yes, Burroughs as well in 1961.

The point was more about systems where we have to deal with C, or derived systems languages, and the related culture that performance trumps safety.

I also find a pity that so far only Solaris SPARC has had proper mitigations in place for C code.

The irony of these kind of mitigations is that computers are evolving into C Machines.

I think especially the cheap smartphone space will benefit. Cheap Android phones are frequently so slow, they could use some cheap higher performance CPUs.

Good phones are getting cheap. Cheap phones are getting good. -Someone who is not me

For what it's worth I'm still daily driving LG G2 and it's legit still fast, sure sometimes it's a bit sleepy but it's still more then usable!

> Good phones are getting cheap. Cheap phones are getting good. -Someone who is not me

Marques Brownlee aka MKBHD and even he admitted that's not the case anymore.

Good phones are getting more and more expensive. A flagship used to cost $700 5 years ago, now it's $1000+.

Cheap phones are getting good, but not at the rate that good phones are getting more expensive.

> For what it's worth I'm still daily driving LG G2 and it's legit still fast, sure sometimes it's a bit sleepy but it's still more then usable!

A quick Googling tells me your phone is from 2013 and can only be updated to Android 5. Your phone is either:

* horrendously out of date and insecure

* using a custom ROM (which I, for one, and many others probably too, don't want to do)

* not used for any kind of internet facing activity (another thing that I and others don't want to do)

Also, you probably have a very low bar for usability and speed. With modern OSes and sites, that phone would probably be extremely slow and laggy for my (and many others') usage.

Your phone uses a Snapdragon 800 which probably has 10-15% (maybe 20-25% if I'm being generous) of the performance of a modern Snapdragon. Phones are not desktops/laptops, where performance levels plateaued in 2005.

I heard it from MKBHD too, but I wasn't sure if he was the original source :P

I wonder how much the inflation affected the pricing of the phones.

Also you can get Poco Phone or OnePlus Nord for reasonable amount of money. But your are right that I'm not the average user since my SIM card is in a Nokia 105, purely because of the battery life.

LG G2 is running a custom ROM with Android 9. And it honestly is usable. Gmail, MS Teams, Puzzle and Dragon, Dualingo and many more applications work without a problem. The probably major difference between how I use the phone and others would probably be that I don't leave applications running in the background. Probably because I think that RAM is the limiting factor here and not the CPU.

I think people don't realise how powerful modern phones actually are, I mean you can record and edit 4k video on today's flagship phones and probably much more.

(ps: yes I carry two phones with me, although I do quite often leave the smart one at home, since the Nokia can handle calls and messages without a problem)

Interesting note, for a 8 years old phone the battery still lasts me the whole day!

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