Solar wrote:
Well, to be quite honest, I vividly remember my first x86 laptop, purchased back in 1999, which had just enough CPU ooomph (PIII @ 500MHz) to play back a DVD without stuttering -- if I didn't do anything else.
(I had Amigas before, and while being fine machines in their own right, playing back DVDs was quite outside their range except for the very lastest PowerPC-driven ones.)
We do want HD quality today, going forward to 4k and 3D, and we do want it stutter-free while we're doing something else in another window.
So it's not as if all that CPU power were unnecessary if not for bloatware.
And GPUs are better equipped for that task nowadays (while in 1999 they were still using fixed pipeline or very primitive shaders). For that kind of heavy tasks it's better to not use the CPU actually.
Solar wrote:
But we're getting sidetracked here. Let's keep this focussed on Meltdown / Spectre and their mitigation.
It's sorta related, seeing as the big issue is that it's a side-effect of speculation and whether we could live without it if really needed.
Reminds me, I'm seeing talks about there being patches to protect against Spectre. I thought it was unfixable? What do those patches do? (besides browser updates to mitigate the javascript proof of concept)