Given the class of Spectre and Meltdown attacks rely on someone else having the freedom to execute code on your hardware, shouldn't something like this be opt-in? There's a whole world of servers out that where Spectre is ultimately completely irrelevant in terms of a security threat, but hyperthreading is definitely not irrelevant in terms of performance.
Read reviews of hyperthreaded performance gain. It's somewhere like 0% or 10%, depending on what you're doing. Not a whole lot. Hyper threading is more like a "silicon trick gone wrong".
Opt-In? (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the class of Spectre and Meltdown attacks rely on someone else having the freedom to execute code on your hardware, shouldn't something like this be opt-in? There's a whole world of servers out that where Spectre is ultimately completely irrelevant in terms of a security threat, but hyperthreading is definitely not irrelevant in terms of performance.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Read reviews of hyperthreaded performance gain. It's somewhere like 0% or 10%, depending on what you're doing. Not a whole lot. Hyper threading is more like a "silicon trick gone wrong".
Re:Opt-In? (Score:2)
In the case of heavy floating point computation, hyperthreading is often a net loss. I haven't seen any tests on the AMD version (SMT) yet.