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Saint Downfall, Who Made the Vectors Fall
Patron of AVX instructions, registers shared with the neighbours, and microcode that slows everything down.
Life
On 8 August 2023 Daniel Moghimi of Google revealed that the gather instruction in Intel processors, from the sixth to the eleventh generation, speculatively leaked data left behind in the vector registers. A program could read keys and secrets from other processes, or from other virtual machines on the same core. The cure, a microcode update, came at a steep performance cost for some workloads.
Prayer
O Saint Downfall, who gathers what others left in the registers, let our vectors forget quickly. Amen.
How to celebrate
Celebrated by updating Intel microcode and measuring, with resignation, the benchmarks before and after.
Who gathers in haste gathers what isn't his.