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  • Meltdown and Spectre Performance Bringing Hardware Asylum into 2018
  • Meltdown and Spectre Performance Bringing Hardware Asylum into 2018

    Published:

    Hosts: Dennis Garcia and Darren McCain
    Time: 30:53

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    Originally recorded January 2018

    Show Notes

    Editor Note:  Sorry this is not the CES 2018 Episode despite the launch day.  This is in fact an "extra" with the main show coming out later this month.

    Meltdown and Spectre FAQ
    By now many of you have been hearing about the Meltdown and Spectre exploits and might be wondering what those are all about.  You can look at it two different ways.  The first is a hardware flaw in how processors handle Speculative Execution.  What happens is that attackers can exploit this flaw and access areas of CPU memory that are not currently allocated, at least to that program.  The second is a software flaw that breaks the fundamental isolation between use applications and the operating system.

    In a way they are both related and impact all modern processors but happen to be particularly damaging to Intel CPUs dating back to 1995.

    In this episode the duo go over a FAQ article published at PCWorld that does a great job at giving us a high level overview of the problem, what it can impact and what companies are doing to fix it.

    State of the Hardware Asylum Address 2018
    In the days of Ninjalane Dennis would often post an end of year retrospective on how the website did in the previous year and what he has planned for the future.   For this segment the duo go over what is planned for 2018 including things like more YouTube, Casemodding and a famed return to Overclocking. 

    Episode 83 featured music:
    Little People - Start Shootin' (http://www.littlepeoplemusic.com/)