[10997] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
RE: Revenge of the WAVEoids: Palladium Clues May Lie In AMD Motherboard Design
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lucky Green)
Fri Jun 28 00:33:26 2002
From: "Lucky Green" <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>
To: <cryptography@wasabisystems.com>, <cypherpunks@lne.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 22:07:19 -0700
In-Reply-To: <p05111a20b94031b205b7@[66.149.49.6]>
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
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