What’s peoples take on the upcoming ultra portable laptops with quad core processors? I do some consulting for a company that has mostly T440s (dual core Haswell 4th gen) laptops or newer in the same series.
Since docks can now work on Thunderbolt USB-C that would potentially save some desk space and the bump in performance from 2 to 4 cores starts making sense.
What does concern me is that Intel released the 8th gen processors despite knowing they were vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown. Maybe this doesn’t apply to all models? Ideally I’d like to upgrade to something where this issue is not present in the hardware.
Either way, do you guys think this is an excellent time to upgrade laptops or would you hold off? And does anyone know if the aforementioned vulnerabilities affect all 8th gen mobile processors as well?
I’m doing the math on what your upgrade cycle for laptops is, … looks like 4 - 5 years. From my point of view you don’t really get to pick which hardware vulnerabilities and errata you pick up and which ones you avoid.
All decent hardware across many different platforms is affected by the Spectre class of issues, and likely will be for a while, OS needs to take care of a lot of these issues by using caches in a less efficient, less predictable, more secure way, essentially by wiping down the other apps and it’s own fingerprints.
Now looks like a much better time to upgrade compared to a lot of time before, considering the recent jump in core count.
If I had the option to upgrade my laptop and I was really concerned about Spectre and Meltdown, I would consider switching to a AMD laptop because they are thought to be less affected by Spectre and Meltdown.
It should be noted here that the Ryzen Pro Mobile APU’s are coming soon, and these should be very competitive with the Intel quadcores. We do have to hope that vendors actually use them well though. It’d be nice to see a Lenovo higher end unit.
Yes I know they are still affected by Spectre, but they apparently are more secure than the Intel platform. If AMD’s add department is smart and it is true AMD’s products are more secure than Intel, they should add a slogan onto their packaging We are more secure than Intel. I bet within a year or two AMD will become the 800 pound Gorilla and Intel would be in second place where it needs to be to learn it’s lesson.
AMD mobile is tempting but from what I know they’re not really that present in the enterprise segment. I will however consider them for my next laptop purchase.
edit: and the question I’m asking is for a business
I figured you wanted to use it for work, I still would check to see if a AND laptop has the feathers you are looking for. Just because you haven’t seen them being use in the enterprise segment doesn’t mean they can’t be used in that environment. I am not just saying that as a fanboy. I believe in using the right tool for the job.
IMO, IME awfulness is probably a more compelling reason to use an AMD business laptop than Meltdown or Spectre… at least M and S can be somewhat mitigated by the OS.
But yeah, few to no options for mobile AMD enterprise, so it’s a hard decision.