asciilifeform: it is 1920s and armies are interested in aviation! except for mircea_popescu's army. he instead ordered all conscripts who can't jump 10,000 metres in the air and stay up by flapping their wings, shot !
asciilifeform: that's the real boojum, and not only of this, but of all other questions re chip.
asciilifeform: at any rate, until this, whether or not chip maker listens to mircea_popescu and omits test circuit or not, the buyer CANNOT verify
asciilifeform: (can even use ~analogue~ optical comparator! ever seen one? they used to exist in machine shops.)
asciilifeform: this is one of the reasons i wrote 'must have fpga, with quartz window'. you can inspect a ~regular~ geometric structure far more easily than any other kind
asciilifeform: until then, we are in a state of sin regardless of how.
asciilifeform: hence a method of printing one-offs MUST be discovered.
asciilifeform: thing is, computer rides on 'promise', not protocol, because there is no way of inspecting the dies.
asciilifeform: until silicon can be made piecewise, like a printer page, rather than photographically by the million copies, we are stuck with it. (and antifuse costs 0 and eliminates problem, so i have nfi what mircea_popescu is smoking)
asciilifeform: it is nonsense, what can i say. and the folks who build machine this way, will come to grief.
asciilifeform: it would not be so hard to implement, just put antifuse link in the relevant circuit
asciilifeform: (southbridge, for instance, has - own. gpu - own. etc)
asciilifeform: incidentally, ~every piece of silicon on the board has a debug port of some form, the cpu jtag thing is simply the handiest one, and the closest to being in some form documented.
asciilifeform: (and in what there is not, can be replaced in the post for a physically-indistinguishable version that does)
asciilifeform: at any rate, and as i wrote long ago, imho soldered-in 'bugs' are quite obsolete - there is built-in hole in ~everything made for eons now.
asciilifeform: (and its existence was, apparently, quite surprising to the monkeys, who never once gave a thought to subj of how mb is tested at factory)
asciilifeform: it isn't 'exploit', that was idiot media spin, it is simply a handy place to plant a widget.
asciilifeform: what to ~do~ with it, is up to the user's imagination !
