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Re:Intel's Ivy Bridge reviewed by aiscott on Monday April 23, 2012 @03:45PM (#3880591)
Teetering must be the marketing term they chose... the phenomenon in play has been known as metastability for as long as I've been a digital designer.

And generally speaking, it's something you want to avoid in your designs, not only because of the unpredictability of the final output (whether it resolves to a 1 or 0), but also because of the uncertainty in how long it will take to resolve.

But it seems perfect for generating randomness. Neat idea. The real trick here is that it's only theoretically unpredictable. In real life, due to "imperfections" in fabrication, the inverters will be biased to resolve one way more frequently. So you might end up with a 60/40 split, for example.

I see they do address this in the article, and have added some "conditioning" to eliminate the bias... I bet it's described in a patent somewhere.

Re:Intel's Ivy Bridge reviewed by paragraft on Monday April 23, 2012 @06:08PM (#3881219)
It's a fairly well studied area, deriving unbiased randomness from a consistently biased source eg http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~qstout/abs/AnnProb84.html

The simplest approach I know of is to extract a random bit repeatedly until it transitions from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0, and then use the second result. 50/50 split, regardless of any (constant) bias in the generator.

Re:Intel's Ivy Bridge reviewed by callan on Monday April 23, 2012 @04:19PM (#3880743)
Also, there is a bit set after executing RDRAND that tells you if you got a 'good' random number.
Re:Intel's Ivy Bridge reviewed by Natsu on Monday April 23, 2012 @05:00PM (#3880942)
Does anyone else feel like that's the sort of thing that will become part of a vulnerability someday?
Re:Intel's Ivy Bridge reviewed by batista on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @03:36AM (#3882895)
No. It's used as a measure to NOT become part of a vulnerability someday, i.e so the system recheck and ask for another random number.
Re:Intel's Ivy Bridge reviewed by Natsu on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @05:35AM (#3883128)
If it's just a flag you can ignore, I think that someone will.