Intel's New X86-S : Eliminating Technical Debt and Adopting FRED

hey everyone Ian from tick Tech potato we're here at combutex and joining me this is George from chips and cheese you know chips and cheese chips and cheese.com go check them out reason why I've got George on today is because he's read something that I haven't Intel has launched a 64-bit only document how do we describe it well it's not really 64-bit only so that's of if you were to read just the sort of the notes and what the media have been saying that's what you would try to get the sense of I mean that's kind of what it sounded like I mean so so just for context I've just as we're filming this I just posted my video about arm going 64-bit only so for Intel to have a similar sort of sounding document you're saying that's not what it is so not so as far as the user so the person using your computer or using the computer there's basically no change there's no user mode change here there's 32-bit programs will still work there is no chains there where the change for the for the removal of 32 and 16 bit comes in is that the sort of lowest level of booting right booting the computer but isn't that where all my security is yes it is and that's partly why Intel is doing this is because now they're just booting straight into what's called long mode or just 64 64-bit mode previously they would have had to boot from 16-bit into 32-bit protected mode and then into 64-bit long mode who wants this so this is mostly for the verification Engineers the people who are making sure that the CPU does what it's supposed to do right that's really who this is for and it's also really it's for design simplification purposes right when when people talk about the technical debt of x86 a lot of action what they're talking about is not the 32-bit Isa because really for x86 there wasn't there aren't huge changes between 32-bit and 64-bit in terms of the actual instructions this is the technical debt they're talking about this sort of protected versus real mode and and 8086 mode which every single x86 CPU still boots as it will still show to the BIOS as an 8086 even to this day that is the technical debt that a lot of people are talking about when they're talking about x86 technical debt now there are people who don't like this change and that's the sort of Homebrew OS bootloader people is that because they're used to how Intel's been for so many decades at this point you know they're gonna have to redesign how they're doing what they're doing yeah that's that's a lot of things they don't want to change and it's like yeah I understand where you're coming from but a lot of this sort of has been coming for years and frankly at this point it's sort of stuff that I think should be done yeah yeah it's kind of redefining that Baseline if you're booting straight into 64-bit mode it just gets around that but so you've read the document and I specifically asked you on because I haven't I've literally only seen kind of the uh the headlines in in a few of the press um it was this a big document it was 46 Pages which is not a huge document for something that's outlining this wait okay so this just sounds like an idea of a plan not necessarily putting anything into into Britain so no this is beyond just sort of a plan of intent so there is sort of the replacement for the current interrupt structure which is what this is changing is what's called Fred that's the acronym for it Fred yes f-r-e-d yes Fred does that stand for so this is this is getting rid of Fred no this is introducing Fred and x86s is essentially the Fred only version of x86 removing all the old IO ring so in x86's IO ring zero one two and three they're getting rid of IO Rings one and two completely getting rid of 32-bit ring zero and they're getting rid of all the protected modes for 16 and 32-bit along with 16-bit addressing completely gone so nobody really used ring one or two anyway as far as I understand not you the user drivers did though and so this is a security precaution so that say your drivers misbehaving well if you have say a like a bad driver that's designed to do something bad it can then escalate from ring zero to Ring to your kernel ring which is if I remember correctly reading three that's it your kernel is completely unobstructed and malware can just spread so this is not just a verification that's Ring zero ring three is user yeah yeah sorry the other way around yeah yeah other way around but uh it's been a Visa week uh so we are at computex uh computers uh but yeah so and once you hit that ring zero it's you're you have no security so this is also for a security reason right but um now a lot of people are like well where's the performance aspect coming in well that isn't really a big thing here except what all these changes may allow Intel to do is to add more page sizes so like a 16k page which Apple has adopted and add sort of different page sizes instead of just continuing with the standard 4K page so so this is an architecture level change to help with memory accessing memory addressing um so so you can know you need to do one large Aries rather than four smaller reads and as well as supporting five layer pages native not natively but instead of needing a separate sort of instruction to do it so if you look at the Aya if you go into Linux and you pull up LS CPU you'll see on Genoa and Sapphire Rapids you'll see what's called La 57 which is uh the fifth level of paging well not to go too deep into it but this will allow just native support of that without needing that sort of so it also simplifies a few things especially for the high end sure yeah right that's that's really what this is supposed to do so you're saying it's a bit more than a letter of intent this is this is going to come in what do we think the timeline could be for this because we all know that Intel okay it's Intel's document but this also applies to AMD everybody else they're already working in on you know generation n plus three and plus four internally could this be coming sooner than we think or is this still something more like five seven years out so Fred which is the replacement for this can be run in conjunction with the old system so so in Fred's documentation has been out for two to three years now so AMD and Intel have had plenty of time to know that this is coming so I suspect that we'll see sort of Fred enabled CPUs yeah these are French CPUs yeah hey Adam there they become fried CPUs oh yeah yeah yeah it's Slytherin batter and deep fry okay so so we're going to be in an ecosystem where it's going to be concurrent and uh the the older way of doing things will slowly be phased out um you know and hopefully it'll be you know full disclosure of when it's going to happen so any any Homebrew kernel developers out there will have chance to get to this point but you're saying a lot of yeah the verification Engineers they they're gonna end up loving this because it just makes their job a lot easier yeah this is not about die size per se but verification Engineers insecurity really well I mean uh Intel especially is going through uh we need to cut costs across the board and if getting rid of some of that technical debt in in order improving that validation the time to Market um this this is another page of that story yeah yeah a very technical page of that story well it's been great having you on the channel George thanks for giving your Insight and no doubt we'll have you on again if you like George go read his stuff over at chips and cheese.com you may even find his stuff at semianalysis.com now over with our Good Fred Dylan but if you like what you uh listen to and watch then please leave a like comment subscribe you know all that jazz whatever you know you know where it is let me know what you think but thanks George thanks Ian [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: TechTechPotato

Views: 24,134

Keywords: intel, x86, x86-s, FRED, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, is this 64-bit only

Id: C_CJn1ZsTJc

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023