On Jan 8, 2018, at 08:02, Joseph Oprysko via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
It’s been said that the Meltdown/Spectre flaws affect CPU’s as far back as 1995. Which in some opinions possibly could put some of the affected processors into the ‘vintage’ range. But I’ve yet to see a comprehensive list of all processors affected. Intel released a list, but that only goes back to around 2011 or so with the branding change to “Core” and others released in the time since.
I’m curious about exactly what CPU devices, regardless of manufacturer, other than those listed, that are also affected. So including ARM processors, AMD, PowerPC?, G3/4/5? that may vulnerable to those flaws. And where they got the 1995 date from, because there’s a fair number of disused processors in that timeframe as well.
Anyone have any insights on this?
On x86, it's P6 and later, which means back to the Pentium Pro. Not sure when AMD started doing speculative execution; would expect around the K6 or so. As for other architectures, I would expect the high end ones (SPARC, MIPS, Alpha and PPC) around that time to be included. Really, anything that performs branch prediction (which I know includes all PowerPCs) is by definition engaging in speculative execution, and I'd be quite surprised if any of them that far back were smart enough not to commit the speculatively fetched data to cache or TLBs, which is the main issue here. That's a lot of logic and buffer space on a CPU. - Dave