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Lot of hacker news is blaming Denuvo. I disagree.

This just goes to show how Intel has failed at pre-grade school level of implementation and testing of processor design.

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Ah yes, fond memories from preschool: on the playground, hop scotch, instruction pipelines, plenty of physical registers to go around. Those were the days.

And the Squid Game screenwriters perk up and start taking notes...

When it comes to heterogeneous cores there are no "right" answers. If all the cores returned identical CPUID information Denuvo would probably work... but the cores are not identical so that would be kind of lying. (Given Intel's historic attention to backwards compatibility I'm a little surprised they don't have a lowest common denominator CPUID spoofing mode.) But if the cores return accurate CPUID then Denuvo can see that the cores aren't the same.

On the other hand, even with CPUID spoofing, if a DRM wants to check that it's running environment is sane, it would not surprise me to see timing consistency checks (if huge spikes occur at some point of time, it may indicate the process is being tampered with. Or that the process got descheduled or there are big loads on the computer, but we're talking about softwares that tend to take the assumption tempering is going on when in doubt so...)

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