[GTALUG] NUC NUC NUC

[Dhaval Giani]

On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 5:46 PM Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 01:05:34AM +0200, Dhaval Giani via talk wrote:
> > Honestly, the latest round of flaws are nothing special. For most
> > desktop use case, I wouldn't worry. It is very difficult to exploit
> > it. If you are really worried, go for something like an i3, which is
> > essentially an i5 with HT disabled. I would be worried about several
> > easier to exploit issues before worrying about MDS or L1TF. (Meltdown
> > was different, but newer CPUs already have it fixed in hardware).
> > Something like Spectre affects every single modern CPU which does
> > speculative execution and we will be fighting it for a long long time.
> >
> > (Of course, if you are in a cloud environment, the situation is different).
>
> Actually the i5 has no HT, the i3 always does.  The i5 is essentially
> an i7 with HT off.
>

This led me on chase, because Intel friends suggested what I said. I
haven't looked too closely yet to see the difference between i3/i5/i7,
but both i3/i5 do NOT have HT as per ark.intel. If i were to make a
guess about the difference between i3/i5, I would go towards the turbo
boost capability. But it is late where I am, and I am speaking early
tomorrow morning :-), so I will look into it tomorrow, and probably
ask a couple of Intel folks here.

Dhaval