> The root cause of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities was that processor architects were trying to build not just fast processors, but fast processors that expose the same abstract machine as a PDP-11.
No, Spectre is the direct result of processors speculatively executing code without respecting the conditions that guard the code. Hands down, processors hallucinate conditions in code. It has nothing to do with the particular computational model, but would happen in any system that speculates conditions.
And not just one branch, but a whole series of them. In fact, the processor is usually running with a whole buffer full of instructions that are executing in parallel, having been loaded into the reorder engine using nothing more than (normally highly accurate) statistical predictions.
No, Spectre is the direct result of processors speculatively executing code without respecting the conditions that guard the code. Hands down, processors hallucinate conditions in code. It has nothing to do with the particular computational model, but would happen in any system that speculates conditions.
And not just one branch, but a whole series of them. In fact, the processor is usually running with a whole buffer full of instructions that are executing in parallel, having been loaded into the reorder engine using nothing more than (normally highly accurate) statistical predictions.