Hector Martin

This is exactly the damn point though Marcan, when you're fighting with a million other factors and trying to squeeze out performance that's an easy mistake to make, and an easy one for a red team to overlook. It's not /good/, and it's not ok that its a problem that exists...

...but this entire attitude is incredibly unhelpful. There are no good security verification tools in silicon design beyond manual review. It's easy for us to call out Intel, but we're post-discovery now. How do we make sure this doesn't happen in the future instead?

Pretty sure the answer isn't just "fuck Intel" and it's not "down with CISC", this is a lot more nuanced than any of you are taking the time to acknowledge. This was likely the mistake of a single engineer that noone caught, and that's understandable becsuse...

...CPU architecture design students werent taught this stuff until really recently. It's easy for us to call them out, but how are they supposed to know if they weren't taught? Shaming mistakes instead of teaching people how to do better only causes more problems.

I'm shaming the *company*, not the *people*. Intel has more than enough money that they should've cared about this stuff, they should've hired people who could point at things like this and say it's a bad idea.

The problem isn't the people working for Intel, it's that Intel allowed things to get this ridiculous. And usually when things get this ridiculous *someone* notices, and I bet someone did, and I bet someone in management shut them down.

That's a pretty bold statement to be making considering how little we know about the internal operations, and whether or not you think you're shaming the company, they don't care, the people that do care are the engineers there and everywhere else that read what we say.

If our environment is this openly hostile to people who make mistakes, no wonder they want to cover them up. After all, look at how we respond when this shit blows open.