Ian Cutress muses upon rumors around SiFive, the forerunner of high-performance RISC-V cores.
I was expecting this to go into the direction of “China has inserted itself as a state level actor into the development of RISC-V, don’t use it”. That would’ve been ridiculous as the US has been meddling with chips for a long time and we still use their stuff. Having chip designs or instruction set architecture out in the open would give me much more confidence in a chip that anything AMD, ARM, Nvidia, qualcomm or whatever out there release.
Of course open ISA doesn’t mean the resulting chip will be open, but it’s a step in the right direction.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Thinking about cybersecurity: does this kind of open-ness mean that some evil guys could now design some evil behaviour into the hardware, and no scanner software will ever be able to detect it, because it is only a software scanner?
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That sounds like lots of extra work, when current CPU manufacturers built that hidden space in already. Intel Management Engine is a great example.
bh64@lemm.ee 1 year ago
security through obscurity is a bad practice.
it’s better to be transparent and let everyone analyze your design. the more eyes on it, the better. even the proprietary and obscured Intel CPUs have had security vulnerabilities in the past.
TheHobbyist@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Do you mean that someone can take the design, place a hardware vulnerability and sell it? Sure, but this does not require RISC V to be possible, there are already vulnerable CPUs sold on the market. People have found such vulnerabilities already in reputable Intel CPUs for example (look up Spectre).
IHeartBadCode@kbin.social 1 year ago
Dell iDRAC comes to mind as well.
baduhai@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Don’t downvote this person, they’re just asking a question.