Power Systems And The Spectre And Meltdown Threats

January 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Speculative execution is something that has been part of modern processors for well over a decade, and while it is hard to quantify how much of a performance benefit this collection of techniques have delivered, it is obviously significant enough that all CPUs, including IBM Power and System z chips, have them. And that, as the new Spectre and Meltdown security holes that were announced by Google on January 3 show, turns out to be a big problem.

Without getting too deep into the technical details, there are many different ways to implement speculative execution, which is used to …