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Intel and AMD shouldn't panic yet, but this Chinese vendor has repacked a Xeon CPU:
Jintide Montage might sound like the name of a punk group, but it's not. In fact, the Montage is an x86 processor with PrC (Pre-Check) and DSC (Dynamic Security Check) technologies that can be used in Jintide or other server platforms.
It shares common DNA with Intel, AMD and VIA and uses Skylake Xeon silicon at its core - and has already entered mass production.
According to the marketing materials, Jintide uses Tsinghua University's DSC technology to achieve "high-speed IO tracing, memory tracing and CPU behavioral checking via its built-in security check engine."
[...] In other words, expect it to be used for anything from website hosting to VPN and cloud storage.
From the available information, we can tell this is not a consumer processor and there's no Core CPU coming from Jintide any time soon. The Montage is also aimed exclusively at the Chinese market, perhaps extending to the country's close allies.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @03:09AM (1 child)
What do those even mean? There are no search results for either of those that aren't copypastas of the article.
What exactly does "repacked" mean? Did they take the processor, add another chip inside it to act as glue logic, and then encase the whole thing in epoxy? That's what it looks like as far as I can tell. I don't see why this is remarkable, and it definitely doesn't make sense that Intel or AMD should get close to panicking.
Actually, it looks like Intel was in on this.
This article is worthless shit. Fortunately, it links to a much better article: https://www.hotchips.org/hc31/HC31_2.11_Jintide_Server_CPU_final_r6.0.pdf [hotchips.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by brkpt on Wednesday May 27 2020, @10:07AM
I can shed some light on this. The headline is completely wrong and misleading. This is about wanting to use Intel processors even though the Chinese don't trust them (because they are US technology which may include all kinds of backdoors). So they take the processor and add some custom chips around it that periodically check if the untrusted processor is violating its specifications. The pdf details how they tested this approach as well as its downsides (tradeoff between detection rate and performance loss).