I kind of blame Google for creating the whole trend of hosting all this mission critical stuff on x86 PCs: https://www.pcworld.com/article/112891/article.html. (Altavista was run in DEC iron. Google pioneered running these services in disposable commodity hardware.) That being said, POWER got hit with some of this stuff too.
These things end up having unintended consequences, it isn't about 'fuck Google', its about identifying the root cause of a problem. X86 PCs come from a long line of non multi user, non multi tasking computers. Whereas DEC mainframes are perhaps the more natural choice for what Google wanted to do.
No I said its not about 'fuck Google', its about identifying the root cause of a problem.
I didn't forsee this, and I don't recall anyone else predicting it, so no I don't think Google should have foreseen it either, but nevertheless it has happened, so we should endeavour to understand why, so it doesn't happen again. It isn't about blame, it isn't about pointing fingers.
Now we've identified an issue, then the next time an industry moves from big iron the commodity X86 PCs we can ask the question, is this going to be a problem?
I think he or she is drawing an analogy between Intel and Google both "cutting corners" to save costs, which worked well for them in the short term but had unforeseen consequences for everyone else over the longer term. This could be an instance of the famous "tragedy of the commons".
"In some cases there’s non-privileged access to suitable timers. For example, in the essentially obsolete Digital/Compaq Alpha processors the architecture includes a processor cycle counter that is readable with a non-privileged instruction. That makes attacks based on timing relatively easy to implement if you can execute appropriate code."
