pull down to refresh
related posts
31 sats \ 0 replies \ @orthzar 9 Aug 2023
When Spectre/Meltdown were was revealed back in 2017, it was clear to me that this wasn't going to get fixed and that CPU manufacturers were never going to return to making in-order and non-speculative CPUs -- which is the only solution to this very serious problem. Lo and behold, the problems keep getting found and CPU manufacturers keep releasing critically vulnerable CPUs, because they consider security to be a tertiary concern.
[skipping rant about how a modern Lisp OS would eliminate any need for out-of-order and speculative execution]
If you are concerned about this, you're only option is to use old and/or slow CPUS;
- Intel Atom CPUs up to and including Bonnell. This is mostly netbooks and low-end servers.
- SPARC server CPUs up to and including the T3 series. The easiest to find are T5140 servers; they can accept a lot of RAM (I think 128GB), but they are not easy to setup.
There are other CPUs, but those are either lower performance than the above or they are very hard to find.
You could get a few HP Mini 1000's (CPU = Atom N270) from Ebay and run a Bitcoin wallet on one; keep another around in case the first one has hardware issues. But be aware that these are limited to 2GB of RAM, so you will be limited to running Linux and minimal if any web browsing.
Also, you can run this if you are running Linux or a supported BSD.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @hn OP 8 Aug 2023
This link was posted by WalterSobchak 2 hours ago on HN. It received 307 points and 85 comments.
reply