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Comment by justinjlynn | Hacker News Reader

The OpenPOWER RISC systems fit nicely in the middle-tier niche.

Agree, though that's basically the last gasp of the UNIX RISC vendors. I wouldn't be surprised to see them shelved soon. Not that they aren't terrific products, but demand is what it is.

There's an opportunity for someone to sell "reasonably" secure hardware at this price point. Especially since Intel certainly isn't selling anything that fits this description.

I think AMD already has that covered with Epyc 2 (Rome) processors.

POWER is also known for being highly SMT, which could lead to them being even more prone to the issues that plagued Intel's implementation of hyperthreading. A single POWER9 core has 4 to 8 threads.

People who are troubled by security issues in Intel's Management Engine may also be suspicious of the firmware in AMD's roughly equivalent Platform Security Processor, which doesn't have a spotless record either. See, e.g., https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/06/amd_cpu_psp_flaw/

I think we were talking about Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks. Not the PSP or IME, although those are concerning too.

Well, Spectre affected pretty much all processors except very slow ones (Cortex-A53) :)

It affected AMD's Zen architecture significantly less. A number of exploits that applied to Intel didn't apply at all to Zen, and the ones that did apply had less costly mitigations than Intel.

I would expect that it would actually be much harder to pull off such an attack, because you've got 4 threads fighting over the same resources instead of 2. These attacks essentially require statistical analysis, and the more noise there is the more difficult the attack would be. If you've got more than just the attacker and the victim threads running on a core than it's a noisier environment to pull off such an attack.

That’s a good point. Also imagine if the attacker controlled 7 out of the 8 threads on a core... maybe they would have even clearer statistics for analysis.

Or maybe POWER9 is completely secure.

My main point was that Epyc has already proven to be much more resistant to these attacks than Intel’s architecture, and it wouldn’t require dealing with porting your applications to run on a niche ISA, with very limited options to buy server hardware, and very few (if any) options to rent cloud instances on POWER9.

>"POWER is also known for being highly SMT, which could lead to them being even more prone to the issues that plagued Intel's implementation of hyperthreading."

Which SMT issues are you referring to here on Intels?

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