Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Insecurity is freedom, as usual.

Intel already angered tons of enthusiasts who have no use for SGX by releasing a microcode update to lock out undervolting, due to that one exploit that relied on undervolting. Now everyone suffers from increased heat and power usage to protect against something they never needed protection from.

View on HN

> Now everyone suffers from increased heat and power usage

Why?

And wasn't sgx removed from newer cpus anyways? At least in desktop/mobile space...

>Why?

because undervolting usually results in lower power draw/higher power efficiency

But they said "everyone" - I imagine undervolting would only be done by people trying to hack the sgx, or maybe try to save a bit of power. So I'd assume 99.99% of users would be unaffected? Or did the cpu undervolt automatically before the update?

FWIW I have undervolted every laptop I've ever had. It's a huge win in terms of battery life and often performance as well because you can avoid ever hitting the thermal envelope. It can be a 30% boost if you have good silicon.

Yes, and that also basically killed Blu-ray support on desktop, because DRM couldn’t be implemented in an acceptable matter otherwise. Fun thing of course is, that you can probably crack any Samsung or $random_cheap_brand Blu-ray player but there are too many of them so there isn’t any group focused on a “big fish to fry”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com