Bad time to buy a laptop?....Spectre and Meltdown news

deadanonymau5

Hi

Ive a MBP but its pretty slow these days and needs a new (and expensive battery) saw some good deals on Windows 10 laptops in the sales.

Just curious is it a bad time to buy a laptop now with the recent news of Spectre and Meltdown? Do you think it would be better to wait for the next gen of Intel chips as the fixes are supposed to dramatically slow down all computers affected by the "Spectre and Meltdown"?

5rtytry56

How many years old is your current setup OP?

Johnboy1951

deadanonymau5 wrote: »

Hi

Ive a MBP but its pretty slow these days and needs a new (and expensive battery) saw some good deals on Windows 10 laptops in the sales.

Just curious is it a bad time to buy a laptop now with the recent news of Spectre and Meltdown? Do you think it would be better to wait for the next gen of Intel chips as the fixes are supposed to dramatically slow down all computers affected by the "Spectre and Meltdown"?

Give it a couple of weeks for all the relevant info and tests to be completed and made public.

I doubt there will be any real speed 'hit' for the likes of laptops and desktop PCs.

The bigger problems seem to be with servers running virtualisation.
So 'cloud services' could take a big hit.

..... or so it seems from the info I have read to date .......

5rtytry56

thought I saw a post here its gone now. Oh well unsubscribe from thread.

Johnboy1951

This video gives a very negative outlook for those of us running older CPUs.
It seems we might well have to discard working hardware for the sake of security and spend big to replace it

On the other hand, as far as I am aware so far, the vulnerabilities that are unpatchable in the OS require physical access to the PC, which should mean that provided we are careful home users will not be vulnerable (it is possible that a specially structured USB device might be able to access the vulnerability on insertion ....... but there continues to be a lot of work being done on this)

BigEejit

Depends on what you are doing. I'd agree with Johnboy, wait until there is more information out there.
https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=105851392#post105851392

I saw a great tweet last week. Can't find it right now so I'll paraphrase it. It went something like: "I have been doing hardware security work for 15 years. I worked in Intel doing chip security for 5 years and I'm now still trying to get my head around Spectre/Meltdown. So don't feel bad if you don't understand it yet".

There are patches for most OS's out already, aside from Microsofts weird Anti-virus issue, but really a lot more is going to come out in the next few weeks about this. I would hold off on investing in any new equipment for a while until we know which chips are or are not affected.

A thing to remember with an issue like this is that, before Spectre/Meltdown the number of Black/Grey/White hats who were reviewing CPU design / implementation was probably quite small. Now, loads more people are looking at CPU designs across all architectures so I expect more vulnerabilities to be released and on multiple architectures. So, don't go and buy an AMD CPU assuming its completely free of any such vulnerabilities.

It's very much a case of "watch this space".

Xterminator

Hi Op

i would suggest the bad time to buy was when this was not in the public domain, but was a 0 day vulnerability that could be leveraged. once the story broke, intel and the OS vendors were absolutely going to invest every resource to make sure the vulnerabilities were patched.

However its naive to assume this situation couldn't happen again in the future. It will. New vulnerabilities in existing systems will be discovered, as they will be found in future unreleased hardware. this specific flaw should not be seen again.

So to answer your question, no, there is no logical reason to not buy hardware at this time for that reason.