The obvious way to simplify the analysis of speculative-execution attacks is to eliminate speculative execution. This is normally dismissed as being unacceptably expensive, but the underlying cost analyses consider only software written for current instruction-set architectures, so they do not rule out the possibility of a new instruction-set architecture providing acceptable performance without speculative execution. A new ISA requires compiler and hardware updates, but these are happening in any case.
This paper introduces BasicBlocker, a generic ISA modification that works for all common ISAs and that allows non-speculative CPUs to obtain most of the performance benefit that would have been provided by speculative execution:
The obvious way to simplify the analysis of speculative-execution attacks is to eliminate speculative execution. This is normally dismissed as being unacceptably expensive, but the underlying cost analyses consider only software written for current instruction-set architectures, so they do not rule out the possibility of a new instruction-set architecture providing acceptable performance without speculative execution. A new ISA requires compiler and hardware updates, but these are happening in any case.
This paper introduces BasicBlocker, a generic ISA modification that works for all common ISAs and that allows non-speculative CPUs to obtain most of the performance benefit that would have been provided by speculative execution: