by Simha Sethumadhavan on Jan 4, 2018 | Tags: Architecture, Hardware, Security
Two high impact microarchitectural timing attacks were disclosed yesterday. (https://nyti.ms/2EOX03d). 10000 ft overview: This is a very intricate attack but the root cause is unflushed speculative state from the cache resulting in a timing variations. Apparently the...
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by David Patterson and Andrew Waterman on Sep 18, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, CPU, ISA, Parallelism
In the process of writing a short introduction to RISC-V, we compared RISC-V vector code to SIMD. We were struck by the insidiousness of the SIMD instruction extensions of ARM, MIPS, and x86. We decided to share those insights in this blog, based on Chapter 8 of our...
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by Mark Silberstein on Sep 14, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, Operating Systems, Virtualization
The efficiency of Operating Systems (OSes) has always been in the spotlight of systems researchers, ever since the seminal Dijkstra’s THE multiprogramming system in early 60s. But the reason for this obsession is not entirely obvious. While the OS is commonly...
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by Yuan Xie on Jun 19, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, Emerging Technology, Memory, Performance, Systems
(This blog is written to celebrate the two-year anniversary for the worlds’ first commercial processor with die-stacking technology, which was released on 6/16/2015, as AMD Fury X GPU) Many of you who attended MICRO 2013 may still remember the keynote speech...
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by Srilatha Manne on Jun 8, 2017 | Tags: Accelerators, Architecture, Hardware, Industry
All hardware companies face a conundrum. Should they build a riskier product that has a higher probability of failure, or should they continue the evolutionary trend of their current products? The safe thing to do, and one that many customers may ask for, is the...
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