On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 01:05:34AM +0200, Dhaval Giani via talk wrote:
Honestly, the latest round of flaws are nothing special. For most desktop use case, I wouldn't worry. It is very difficult to exploit it. If you are really worried, go for something like an i3, which is essentially an i5 with HT disabled. I would be worried about several easier to exploit issues before worrying about MDS or L1TF. (Meltdown was different, but newer CPUs already have it fixed in hardware). Something like Spectre affects every single modern CPU which does speculative execution and we will be fighting it for a long long time.
(Of course, if you are in a cloud environment, the situation is different).
Actually the i5 has no HT, the i3 always does. The i5 is essentially an i7 with HT off. -- Len Sorensen