[pintxo]

"The processor should perform as described - anything less is a very nasty surprise waiting for users. Intel could allow users to opt-in to less performant behaviour for security, but bad performance absolutely must be opt-in rather than opt-out."

Take away: it all depends on the users preferences. I am with you, in most cases, it should be about security, but I guess there are legitimate use-cases for the opposite as well.

[isostatic]

I do video crunching on internal systems, I'm happy that the code I run has nothing to gain from spectre or meltdown, but even a 10% drop in performance is bad, and sometimes can mean doubling the cost (if the cpu that was encoding two real time feeds is no longer powerful enough to do so without dropping frames)

Not every one runs a lamp stack on the intenet.

That said the default should be security. I have to opt in for "maximum performance" in the bios of my hp kit, rather than "balanced power and performance", why shouldn't I have to opt in to "faster but less secure"?

[lmm]

> "The processor should perform as described - anything less is a very nasty surprise waiting for users. Intel could allow users to opt-in to less performant behaviour for security, but bad performance absolutely must be opt-in rather than opt-out."

But that isn't true. Poor performance is not remotely in the same class of "very nasty surprise" that security model violations are.