Latest News from AMD and Intel

Privacy

• Intel cares about an individual's privacy, check out: http://www.intel.com/sites/corporate/privacy.htm
• Intel is working with the industry to reinforce responsible use of users' personal information:
• Providing and promoting guidelines for responsible usageExploring industry certification programs
• Intel is and will continue to be a role model for responsible use of users' personal information
• In our own on-line practicesIn our products and services

CDSA

• The Common Data Security Architecture, or CDSA, is an open, interoperable, extensible, cross-platform software framework developed by Intel and adopted by The Open Group. CDSA provides fundamental APIs that developers can use to incorporate security features in their applications.
• Intel is an industry leader in evolving and promoting open, interoperable solutions for Internet security. Intel recognizes that a strong security infrastructure is essential to enable rapid growth of the Internet for e-commerce, secure communications, and for the consumption of high-value content on the PC.
• Adoption of the CDSA open specification will improve the interoperability of security-enabled applications, a key challenge in improving Internet security and utility for business and consumer use.
• Intel is committed to working with the industry so that ISVs will be able to gain access to Intel's core security features through the architecture/software stack of their choice: including CAPI, CDSA and RSA's BSafe toolkit

The new identification number is not targeted against processor remarking and Intel is not planning to provide a list where each identification numbers refers to the proper CPU speed. This number is not meant to fight overclocking, it's only meant to improve network security.

I personally wonder if it will be very difficult for hackers trying to fish out identification numbers from users that have the feature turned on, as done by default. Then the hackers would only need to send those stolen identification numbers to the e-commerce business and they can act as if they were this very user. We will have to see if the encoding of the identification number will be sufficient enough. Another problem appears for people that are using several different systems or people who upgrade their CPU. You can see that there are quite a few open questions still, which will certainly be addressed by Intel today. I guess that AMD will have to jump on the identification number train as well, unless they want to be marked as providing 'insecure CPUs'.

Overclock Protection

Intel told me today that the current Celeron processors are not bus clock locked and that there are currently no plans to implement this on Celeron. This means that you can continue to overclock Celeron CPUs, but please remember that the clock multiplier is locked and will stay locked. The same is valid for Pentium II CPUs. You will understand that there was no official comment on Pentium III and later Intel CPUs. Those may be completely overclock protected. We will find out as soon as final Pentium III CPUs become available at the end of February.