RE: Revenge of the WAVEoids: Palladium Clues May Lie In AMD Motherboard Design
At 10:07 PM 06/26/2002 -0700, Lucky Green wrote: An EMBASSY-like CPU security co-processor would have seriously blown the part cost design constraint on the TPM by an order of magnitude or two. Compared to the cost of rewriting Windows to have a infrastructure that can support real security? Maybe, but I'm inclined to doubt it, especially since most of the functions that an off-CPU security co-processor can successfully perform are low enough performance that they could be done on a PCI or PCMCIA card, without requiring motherboard space. I suppose the interesting exception might be playing video, depending on how you separate functions. (Obviously the extent of redesign is likely to be much smaller in the NT-derived Windows versions than the legacy Windows3.1 derivatives that MS keeps foisting upon consumers. Perhaps XP Amateur is close enough to a real operating system for the kernel to be fixable?) I am not asserting that security solutions that require special-purpose CPU functionality are not in the queue, they very much are, but not in the first phase. This level of functionality has been deferred to a second phase in which security processing functionality can be moved into the core CPU, since a second CPU-like part is unjustifiable from a cost perspective.
RE: Revenge of the WAVEoids: Palladium Clues May Lie In AMD Motherboard Design
At 10:07 PM 06/26/2002 -0700, Lucky Green wrote: An EMBASSY-like CPU security co-processor would have seriously blown the part cost design constraint on the TPM by an order of magnitude or two. Compared to the cost of rewriting Windows to have a infrastructure that can support real security? Maybe, but I'm inclined to doubt it, especially since most of the functions that an off-CPU security co-processor can successfully perform are low enough performance that they could be done on a PCI or PCMCIA card, without requiring motherboard space. I suppose the interesting exception might be playing video, depending on how you separate functions. (Obviously the extent of redesign is likely to be much smaller in the NT-derived Windows versions than the legacy Windows3.1 derivatives that MS keeps foisting upon consumers. Perhaps XP Amateur is close enough to a real operating system for the kernel to be fixable?) I am not asserting that security solutions that require special-purpose CPU functionality are not in the queue, they very much are, but not in the first phase. This level of functionality has been deferred to a second phase in which security processing functionality can be moved into the core CPU, since a second CPU-like part is unjustifiable from a cost perspective.
RE: Revenge of the WAVEoids: Palladium Clues May Lie In AMD Motherboard Design
Bob wrote quoting Mark Hachman: The whitepaper can not be considered a roadmap to the design of a Palladium-enabled PC, although it is one practical solution. The whitepaper was written at around the time the Trusted Computing Platform Association (TCPA) was formed in the fall of 2000; both Wave and AMD belong to the TCPA. And, while Palladium uses some form of CPU-level processing of security algorithms, the AMD-Wave whitepaper's example seems wholly tied to an off-chip security processor, the EMBASSY. An EMBASSY-like CPU security co-processor would have seriously blown the part cost design constraint on the TPM by an order of magnitude or two. I am not asserting that security solutions that require special-purpose CPU functionality are not in the queue, they very much are, but not in the first phase. This level of functionality has been deferred to a second phase in which security processing functionality can be moved into the core CPU, since a second CPU-like part is unjustifiable from a cost perspective. Given the length of CPU design cycles and the massive cost of architecting new functionality into a processor as complex as a modern CPU, we may or may not see this functionality shipping. Much depends on how well phase 1 of the TCPA effort fares. --Lucky
Re: Revenge of the WAVEoids: Palladium Clues May Lie In AMD Motherboard Design
R. A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: WAVE, some of you might remember, was started by a former NatSemi Chairman back before the internet got popular. It was going to be a dial-up book-entry- to-the-screen content control system with special boards and chips patented to down to it's socks. Think of it as DIVX for PCs, with a similar chance of success (see my earlier post about TCPA being a dumping ground for failed crypto hardware initiatives from various vendors). Its only real contribution is that the WAVEoid board on Ragingbull (alongside the Rambus one) is occasionally amusing to read, mostly because it shows that the dot-com sharemarket situation would be better investigated by the DEA than the FTC. Peter.
RE: Revenge of the WAVEoids: Palladium Clues May Lie In AMD Motherboard Design
Bob wrote quoting Mark Hachman: The whitepaper can not be considered a roadmap to the design of a Palladium-enabled PC, although it is one practical solution. The whitepaper was written at around the time the Trusted Computing Platform Association (TCPA) was formed in the fall of 2000; both Wave and AMD belong to the TCPA. And, while Palladium uses some form of CPU-level processing of security algorithms, the AMD-Wave whitepaper's example seems wholly tied to an off-chip security processor, the EMBASSY. An EMBASSY-like CPU security co-processor would have seriously blown the part cost design constraint on the TPM by an order of magnitude or two. I am not asserting that security solutions that require special-purpose CPU functionality are not in the queue, they very much are, but not in the first phase. This level of functionality has been deferred to a second phase in which security processing functionality can be moved into the core CPU, since a second CPU-like part is unjustifiable from a cost perspective. Given the length of CPU design cycles and the massive cost of architecting new functionality into a processor as complex as a modern CPU, we may or may not see this functionality shipping. Much depends on how well phase 1 of the TCPA effort fares. --Lucky
