Comment by less_less

The data-dependent prefetcher is a cool feature, though you do have to be careful with side-channel issues, so some of them can disable it with the Data-Independent Timing bit or similar.

At this point I'm kinda expecting CPU vendors to stop putting as many Spectre mitigations in the main core, and just have a small crypto core with full-fat arithmetic, less hardware for memory access, less speculation, and careful side-channel hardening. You still have to block Meltdown and other large vulnerabilities on the main cores, but if someone wants to protect elliptic curves from weird attacks? Try to set the DIT bit, trap into the OS, and get sent to the hardened core.