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I'm afraid it doesn't work like this. That would only be possible if the chip was using an FPGA fabric for the relevant parts of the design. For example if the L1 cache was implemented as an FPGA you could in theory patch around L1TF. But they wouldn't do that because it would be far slower/larger than implementing it directly as an ASIC.

Or you might imagine a chip that has an FPGA on the side (I expected Intel would ship this after acquiring Altera, but it never happened). But the FPGA would somehow have to have access to the paths that caused the vulnerability, which is highly unlikely, and would also be really slow compared to what they actually do which is hacking around it by microcode changes.



> Or you might imagine a chip that has an FPGA on the side (I expected Intel would ship this after acquiring Altera, but it never happened).

They did: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab...

But I get the sense this part was aimed at a few very specific customers. It required some PCB-level power delivery changes, so you couldn't even drop it into a standard server motherboard.




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