Spectre & Meltdown

[Mike Stein]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Warner Losh via cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
To: "Murray McCullough" <c.murray.mccullough at gmail.com>; "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2018 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: Spectre & Meltdown


> On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 11:00 AM, Murray McCullough via cctalk <
> cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> This may be off-topic but these latest uprocessor exploits has raised
>> a question: Are the 'old/classic' uprocessors using x86 technology in
>> the same boat? The very earliest ones, i.e., 1970s and early 80's.
>> probably not. How many are actually in use and/or on the Net?
>>
> 
> I've seen it reported, but haven't verified, that this bug extends about 20
> years back in the past to the Pentium Pro/Pentium II class of machines. If
> I read that correctly, there's only two generations of Pentium not
> affected, the P54C and P55C, the former of F00F fame... 386 and 486 CPUs
> apparently aren't affected since they didn't have speculative execution.
> The 8088/8086/80186/80286 presumably are also immune... If you extend
> things further back, CP/M on Z80/8080 is also fine, but I don't think those
> are properly x86 :)
> 
> Warner
--------
Finally, an excuse to use all those old 486 boxes...

m