My personal take is that perhaps chipmakers will start to see different market pressures. Performance is the big one, and it's been around since the first microprocessor. Power became increasingly more important, particularly in the past decade, from both ends of the market. (Both mobile devices and supercomputers are very power conscious.)
Security may become a new market pressure. You will likely sacrifice performance to get it, as it will mean simpler cores, maybe in-order, and probably without speculative execution. But, with simpler cores, we can probably further increase hardware parallelism, which will only partially mitigate the loss in single-threaded performance. Some chips may even be more radically security conscious, and guarantee no shared caches between processes. Such chipmakers would be able to say: we can't say for certain that these chips are fully secure, but because they are simpler with less attack vectors, we are far more confident they are. Security conscious chips may tend to be the ones that are internet facing (your mobile device, cloud data centers), and faster, less security conscious chips may only exist behind strict firewalls.
I bring this up in response to the submitted article because I find it unlikely that we will start to model processor insecurity at the language level. It ruptures too many levels of abstraction. I find it more likely that we will find ways to maintain those abstractions.
Security may become a new market pressure. You will likely sacrifice performance to get it, as it will mean simpler cores, maybe in-order, and probably without speculative execution. But, with simpler cores, we can probably further increase hardware parallelism, which will only partially mitigate the loss in single-threaded performance. Some chips may even be more radically security conscious, and guarantee no shared caches between processes. Such chipmakers would be able to say: we can't say for certain that these chips are fully secure, but because they are simpler with less attack vectors, we are far more confident they are. Security conscious chips may tend to be the ones that are internet facing (your mobile device, cloud data centers), and faster, less security conscious chips may only exist behind strict firewalls.
I bring this up in response to the submitted article because I find it unlikely that we will start to model processor insecurity at the language level. It ruptures too many levels of abstraction. I find it more likely that we will find ways to maintain those abstractions.