With all the speculative leaks and multithreading /hyperthreading issues ...

[William Gaatjes]

How do these leaks between multithreading work out with the POWER cores from IBM ?
I recall that power cores have x2 multithreading and even x4 multithreading for power 7.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7

Where are these kind of processor used ?
Are they even vulnerable ?

 

[Arkaign]

The Power series lineup is fairly old now.

https://wp.cpsts.com/products/iseries-power-systems-solutions/end-life-ibm-power6-power7-systems/

Getting ready for EOL, and any still in operation are really pushing it.

As for similar attacks, almost certainly yes, they could be. However, someone would have to have a legitimate reason to do so.

When Spectre and Meltdown came out, there was initially news that AMD was only vulnerable to one of these and not the other. However, as time went along, a new variant emerged which indeed brought a new attack that exposed the AMD architecture as well. None of these are all that relevant to home users in most cases compared to other more common risks such as phishing/etc.

Anyway, if similar effort would be applied exclusively to say Power 6 or Power 7, yeah, probably. But I don't think anyone is going to be doing so.

Security by obscurity, it's more of a reality than some people may realize.

 

[SarahKerrigan]

The Power series lineup is fairly old now.

https://wp.cpsts.com/products/iseries-power-systems-solutions/end-life-ibm-power6-power7-systems/

Getting ready for EOL, and any still in operation are really pushing it.

Please tell me you only meant P6/P7. Power is alive and well; Power9 just came out and Power10 is being worked on.

To answer OP's question, Power systems are used in enterprise servers (including very large ones - the IBM E980 goes to 16 sockets in one system) and supercomputers (the top two fastest supercomputers in the world right now are both Power9 systems.) You can also get them in workstations from Raptor Computing Systems.

Some, but not all, side-channel issues have affected Power; IBM has a handy page with more info.

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/psirt/potential-impact-processors-power-family/

 

[Arkaign]

Indeed. I should have clarified that Power7 and older are an extreme dead end, not the root architecture overall. 🙂

 

[IntelUser2000]

Security by obscurity, it's more of a reality than some people may realize.

Yup. I agree. Even thieves do it for the money. It's just easier to profit from attacking a larger surface.

If the two methods are equally secure, but one has 90% volume share and the other 10%, the first is much more vulnerable. It's easier to get the mass market system, there will be more documentation on it, and more users on it too.