Computer Architecture Today

Informing the broad computing community about current activities, advances and future directions in computer architecture.
Archive of posts tagged: Architecture
Hardware Security

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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SIMD Instructions Considered Harmful

SIMD Instructions Considered Harmful

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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