>
> The nicest thing is with AMD CPUs it turns on a very nice anti-virus
> bit so that as the CHIP level it will deny applications the ability to
> get virus's into your system. I forget the finer details but i found
> out about it months ago from my friend at AMD.
It is a protection against buffer overflows. Memory segments have to be explicitly marked as 'executable' before its content can be executed. So if you don't check the length of strings you insert in buffers and you have a buffer overflow, they still can not be executed.
> It should cut out 90%
> of the viruses that come get put out and give another level of
> protection. Microsoft worked specifically with AMD and vica versa to
> work out the system which will be a big selling point for AMD cpus now
> until Intel catchs up :>
I am quite disapointed with the way Microsoft has implemented this. They only implement it on AMD-64 chips, and they implement it as 'no execute' permissions. On the other hand, OpenBSD has had this for a while now using a 'write or execute' strategy (you can't have the write bit and the execute bit both set on a memory chunk) and they even have an implementation for i386 systems.
With all its resources, Microsoft should do better.
Jochem
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