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New Way to Patch Defective Hardware
brunascle writes "Researchers have devised a new way to patch hardware. By treating a computer chip more like software than hardware, Josep Torrellas, a computer science professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, believes we will be able to fix defective hardware by a applying a patch, similar to the way defective software is handled. His system, dubbed Phoenix, consists of a standard semiconductor device called a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Although generally slower than their application-specific integrated circuit counterparts, FPGAs have the advantage of being able to be modified post-production. Defects found on a Phoenix-enabled chip could be resolved by downloading a patch and applying it to the hardware. Torrellas believes this would give chips a shorter time to market, saying "If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market.""
Don't bother reading TFA, there is no more information there than what's in the summary. Just some additional hand waving about how this enabling technology will magically detect and fix hardware bugs.
I'm sure the professor has developed _something_, but the article sure doesn't give any clue what it might be. This story is nothing more than an exceptionally poor description of what any FPGA can do.
So we'd get to have these chips in PCs sooner, and in return, they'd be less reliable? No thanks. One Pentium floating-point problem was bad enough.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
So, from a customer viewpoint, what this offers is slower, more expensive hardware that is less tested and buggier than the competitors coming down the pipeline in a month or two?
I suspect I an do without.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market."
Oh great, now we'll have hardware as crappy as software. I guess we'll have to get used to the new QA mantra: "If it solders, ship it!" Sigh.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Nothing.
And this is the reality NOW.
Erasing the BIOS, stopping fans, overclocking and overvolting chips can be done TODAY.
Also, changing the region of a DVD drive until it locks out changes and leaving it on a unwanted region is also doable; another "advantage" of this attack is that it is a felony to repair the hardware thanks to the DMCA giving DRM the force of law.
Killer POKEs didn't die with the Commodore PET and C64, they just aren't literal POKEs anymore.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I can't believe I'm even reading this.
The entire selling point of this system is that it allows hardware developers to do sloppy work? Great! The build-and-fix approach has worked wonders for software what with constant security alerts and all, why not use it for hardware? Inspired!
Have they put any thought into this at all?
That other people might make malicious "patches"?
That they'd be opening up hardware to all the vulnerabilities that software has?
Jesus christ people, use some common sense.
Predates FPGAs by decades.. Sure they have advanced things greatly, but where the hell has this guy been the last 30 or so years? Under a rock?
Personally I was using proms as rudmentary programmable logic 20 years ago.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Half of Google is in "Beta", 90% of the video games I buy are beta-quality, more and more software now-days is labeled as "beta release 3.1415", I don't need to beta-test a processor or GPU as well! While it would be nice to be able to _add_ things to your CPU, like support for SSE42, I think something like this in a CPU would cause more harm than good.
It'd also make debugging software that much harder, as you won't be sure where the problem lies, with the CPU or the software program itself.
Sure, and those lessons are being fastidiously applied here. Customers buy that buggy, undercooked software and wait for the patches. Problem is, in increasing numbers of cases, the vendors are learning that they don't have to even ship patches (e.g. game industry, commodity hardware drivers and apps) or only for a very short lifetimes.
Fast-followers usually have much better products than first-to-market vendors, and it used to be that they had better success as well. I am not sure that is always the case these days. Look also at the release of Vista and the fact that a new XP system simply cannot be purchased, locking customers into being beta testers (or getting off the platform entirely).
In some sense, this has already extended to hardware as more and more depends on firmware and flashable updates. a good portion of drivers for some hardware consists of software to offload to firmware, one of the things that makes opensource drivers a pain.
In a sense I'm a bit surprised that nobody has thought of the application of redundancy to chip manufacture before now.
They already do.
RAM and Flash chips typically have a few redundant memory banks.
Graphics chips with faulty modules are sold as lower performing parts (example - the Nvidia 6800 LE and the 6800 Ultra both have the NV40 chip, but the LE has 8 pixel pipelines and 2 vertex shaders disabled).
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
What bothers me personally is that "it's easier to upgrade" is one of the excuses used when producing those skimmed-down Windows-devices. You can guess twice if it's ever improved the quality of the products, or if even half of the bugs they ship with ever get any attention from the vendors.
So yeah, please give them one more reason to ship too early, more often and cheap enough to sell by the bucketload.