Re: Intel Pentium Bug

[rkuhljr () PUERIDOMUS BR (Rubens Kuhl Jr.)]

A possible architeture is a shadow RAM mechanism, in which microcode is
stored in ROM and shadowed during power-up to a static RAM area in the
chip.
This could make Pentium upgradable by the host OS every time it boots
up, and it would come at no cost if this was introduced to speed-up
execution.

(RAM and ROM above refers to electronic blocks at the processor core,
not to their chip-size counterparts)

Just to mention, Digital Alpha processors has some of the instruction
range microcode-loadable, and this is used to taylor the instructions to
the operating system it's running: VMS, Unix or NT.


Rubens Kuhl Jr.
rkuhljr () pueridomus br

        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Aleph One [SMTP:aleph1 () DFW NET]
        Sent:   Saturday, November 08, 1997 2:07 AM
        To:     BUGTRAQ () NETSPACE ORG
        Subject:        Re: Intel Pentium Bug

        > 2- New microcode will not be permanent, otherwise, if you, by
mistake,
        >    put garbage in your CPU, you'll not have to throw the CPU
in the trash.

        Good point. But do they have enough memory to store the original
copy of
        the microcode and the update? Unlikely, that memory is highly
expensive.

        As other have pointed out you may need to use a device to
reprogram the
        chip (makes sense). This would allow intel and OEMs to fix the
parts on
        their inventory and to trade parts for customers concerned. Of
curse with
        a problem of this magnitude _EVERYONE_ that runs a multiuser
system will
        want to upgrade. Thats a lot of people. And a software fix would
make it
        easy to distribute.

        There must be some quite some activity tonight at Intel.