[Theodores]

It is funny how ChromeOS is the most ridiculously secure of the commonly available operating systems. It is not as if you can do much other than surf the internet with it.

It makes me chuckle to think that my not-so-computer-literate friend whom I gave a Chromebook to is protected from anyone snooping in on Youtube, Hotmail and Youtube running on this toy machine (designed for 9 year olds). There really is nothing to hide there. Meanwhile, people doing important work on proper computers are properly vulnerable to this new Hyperthreading theoretical attack.

I will be interested to find out if there is a drop-off in performance on ChromeOS, e.g. Youtube stuttering whilst the whatsapp web tab updates itself with a new message. If there is nobody complaining then why did we need Hyper-Threading in the first place?

[v7p1Qbt1im]

You can run Android and Linux apps on ChromeOS. And with PWA‘s and WebAssembly maturing the difference between native app and web app is getting smaller and smaller. Many developers use it for work. A lot of dev work in the enterprise isn‘t done locally anyway.

[saagarjha]

> It is not as if you can do much other than surf the internet with it.

You can run Android apps and run Linux programs.

[jnordwick]

Spectre/Meltdown are sacred cows in HN. Any comment that tries to bring a realistic view of them is immediately voted into the floor.

[silversconfused]

Hyper threading was an intel stop-gap reaction to the athalon64 x2, which was a REAL dual core, to buy them time while the pentium D was created and later laughed off the market. We finally got an "OK" dual core from intel when they decided to hack pentium 3 cores together and call it the Core duo, and with the core 2 duo they finally caught back up to AMD (by hacking amd64 instructions onto the P3 cores) and were able to start taking market share back. Nothing interesting happens between then and threadripper, but now we would be back to eating popcorn and watching the rest of the fight..... but the fight is over and everyone is over in the other arena watching arm and webkit winner-take-all style demolishing the incumbent platforms.

[DeepYogurt]

> Hyper threading was an intel stop-gap reaction to the athalon64 x2

No. Hyper threading was introduced in Feb 2002. The original single core athlon 64 was Sept 2003. The x2 was 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon_64

[temac]

Calling Core duo a Pentium III core, esp. when talking about microarchs, is a slight misrepresentation. Of course it was way closer and more of a derivative of the PPro descendants. But P6 did not vary a lot between PPro and P III, while before reaching Core Duo it went through Pentium M, and then enhanced. So yeah, it looks like more a Pentium III than a Pentium 4, but it was certainly not just a "hack [gluing] pentium 3 cores together"

Also Netburst was not that bad. It was a dead-end, yes, but on some markets it could compete with what AMD had.

Plus implementing SMT is not necessarily extremely easy compared to SMP, especially when you evolve designs.

And anyway, Intel shipped HT way before AMD shipped the Athlon 64 x2...