Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability

Re:Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability by SimonBiggs on Thursday February 01, 2018 @02:49PM (#16285205)

There would need to be two separate products. One covered by higher liability intended for use in critical systems, and the other under the standard liability.

I imagine that the higher liability CPU would likely be slow, old, and very very expensive. But that is the compromise required on behalf of the consumer.

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Re:Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability by the8472 on Thursday February 01, 2018 @03:18PM (#16285469)

That's pretty much what the military and satellite operators buy. Older, simpler CPUs manufactured on larger nodes, radiation-hardened to boot and with years of proven track record and bug fixes.

And then they buy two or three per system for redundancy.

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Re:Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability by monocasa on Thursday February 01, 2018 @03:40PM (#16285651)

And they pay for that too. A RAD750 was about $200,000 each according to wikipedia.

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Re:Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability by Dylan16807 on Friday February 02, 2018 @01:59PM (#16293221)

I'd say that the hardening is the overwhelming motivator there. That's the reason to be on a huge node. If you're not worried about radiation, you could shrink the same design, making it cheaper and faster and have larger safety margins all at the same time.

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Re:Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability by gnode on Thursday February 01, 2018 @03:04PM (#16285350)

What's a critical system? Is it okay for some things to have compromised security?

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Re:Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability by dfox on Thursday February 01, 2018 @05:21PM (#16286482)

Safety and security are two different things that are very often at odds with each other.

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