This year CES 2018 was held in the shadow of discussion of the vulnerabilities of Specter and Meltdown, and almost every conversation at the event addressed this topic.
TechCrunch journalists also took the opportunity to discuss the problem with ARM's executive director Simon Segars, who spoke about security, the revealed problems of speculative computing of modern processors and the fight against them.
First of all, Mr. Segars noted that the revealed vulnerabilities showed how much microprocessors currently exist.
Then he stressed that Specter and Meltdown use architectural features of high-performance processors, and ARM sells licenses primarily for chips of a different design, so only 5% of solutions using its architecture are subject to attacks.
To better understand the scale of these 5%, it should be noted that at present, according to the head, more than 120 billion chips using this or that ARM design have been released.
Simon Segars noted that there are already updates for operating systems (including, of course, Android) against the discussed vulnerabilities.
Then the journalist asked him how such patches will affect the performance of devices with ARM chips. The head responded evasively: "To be honest, it's too early to talk about it.
This is highly dependent on the type of tasks, from the specific application. " However, he said that in some tasks that require high performance, the speed will decrease, and added: "In most cases, which users are dealing with - surfing the Internet, e-mail and many other options for mobile devices - the difference will not be visible ".
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