Intel ME/AMT. It's a massive security risk, offering ring -3 access to anyone that can exploit it. It doesn't help that it's completely proprietary, and very little was known about it until...
As far as Qubes is concerned, it's a shame these only come with Intel CPUs, considering they're ridden with vulnerabilites like MeltdownPrime and are more vulnerable to Spectre-esque side channel...
As far as Qubes is concerned, it's a shame these only come with Intel CPUs, considering they're ridden with vulnerabilites like MeltdownPrime and are more vulnerable to Spectre-esque side channel attacks (relative to their AMD counterparts). Weakens the isolation offered by Xen by a fair amount, doesn't it?
The only vendors I know of, that offer laptops with this stuff disabled are System76, Dell (3 products, a rugged tablet and laptop among them) and pur.ism Some of those are quite configurable,...
The only vendors I know of, that offer laptops with this stuff disabled are System76, Dell (3 products, a rugged tablet and laptop among them) and pur.ism
Some of those are quite configurable, with up to 64gb of RAM, so I wouldn't be surprised if that goes up to 128gb soon.
I usually ssh into my desktop from something more portable for compute-heavy tasks, as opposed to lugging my desktop around in the form of a 5-pound block of magnesium and silicon. I personally...
I usually ssh into my desktop from something more portable for compute-heavy tasks, as opposed to lugging my desktop around in the form of a 5-pound block of magnesium and silicon. I personally can't see the point of having something like this, outside a few edge cases, when internet is fairly ubiquitous. Would anyone who owns one of these things mind telling me what they use it for? Genuinely curious.
I'm not really convinced that those items would require so many resources, either. 32GB I could see if you're really trying to strain your system with a ton of VR or VMs, but I feel like your CPU...
I'm not really convinced that those items would require so many resources, either. 32GB I could see if you're really trying to strain your system with a ton of VR or VMs, but I feel like your CPU would end up being strained more quickly than your RAM would bottleneck. You would need to have some seriously data-intensive tasks to start approaching that limit. Maybe crunching data by loading up massive arrays of database entries in memory, but that sounds more like a business use case where you would have a dedicated server rather than a laptop. Maybe if you're dealing with some incredibly massive images in Photoshop? Even then, approaching 128GB before the program crashes or slows to a halt seems a tad unlikely. In all of those cases, it seems like you would want some form of desktop or server environment where you can get far better performance.
I'm wondering if there's an actual practical use for a laptop with 128GB of RAM. I'm straining to think of a use case that actually makes sense.
Your comment seems to imply the huge RAM has something to do with improving speed bottlenecks. I don't think that's necessarily the case. It would allow you to load up a bunch of VR content or...
Your comment seems to imply the huge RAM has something to do with improving speed bottlenecks. I don't think that's necessarily the case. It would allow you to load up a bunch of VR content or virtual machines and just leave them sitting in the background idle.
Maybe if you're dealing with some incredibly massive images in Photoshop? Even then, approaching 128GB before the program crashes or slows to a halt seems a tad unlikely.
On the contrary, I think that's a fantastic use case for a ton of RAM. Maybe rather than one single unfathomably large image loaded into Photoshop, you could have many reasonably-large images loaded. You don't have to be actively processing them just to take advantage of RAM; they could be sitting in the background.
Same with browser tabs/processes which could collectively take up a ton of RAM but don't necessarily need to be actively running intensive processing at any given moment.
What I'm envisioning is that you'd never have to close files or programs again. Instead you can organize your workflow using virtual desktops/workspaces and similar setups, allowing you to hop between tasks quickly, and without having to reopen/re-process files when doing so.
What's that?
Intel ME/AMT. It's a massive security risk, offering ring -3 access to anyone that can exploit it. It doesn't help that it's completely proprietary, and very little was known about it until recently. See How to Hack a Turned Off Computer, or Running Unsigned Code in Intel Management Engine (pdf warning).
As far as Qubes is concerned, it's a shame these only come with Intel CPUs, considering they're ridden with vulnerabilites like MeltdownPrime and are more vulnerable to Spectre-esque side channel attacks (relative to their AMD counterparts). Weakens the isolation offered by Xen by a fair amount, doesn't it?
The only vendors I know of, that offer laptops with this stuff disabled are System76, Dell (3 products, a rugged tablet and laptop among them) and pur.ism
Some of those are quite configurable, with up to 64gb of RAM, so I wouldn't be surprised if that goes up to 128gb soon.
I usually ssh into my desktop from something more portable for compute-heavy tasks, as opposed to lugging my desktop around in the form of a 5-pound block of magnesium and silicon. I personally can't see the point of having something like this, outside a few edge cases, when internet is fairly ubiquitous. Would anyone who owns one of these things mind telling me what they use it for? Genuinely curious.
I'm not really convinced that those items would require so many resources, either. 32GB I could see if you're really trying to strain your system with a ton of VR or VMs, but I feel like your CPU would end up being strained more quickly than your RAM would bottleneck. You would need to have some seriously data-intensive tasks to start approaching that limit. Maybe crunching data by loading up massive arrays of database entries in memory, but that sounds more like a business use case where you would have a dedicated server rather than a laptop. Maybe if you're dealing with some incredibly massive images in Photoshop? Even then, approaching 128GB before the program crashes or slows to a halt seems a tad unlikely. In all of those cases, it seems like you would want some form of desktop or server environment where you can get far better performance.
I'm wondering if there's an actual practical use for a laptop with 128GB of RAM. I'm straining to think of a use case that actually makes sense.
Your comment seems to imply the huge RAM has something to do with improving speed bottlenecks. I don't think that's necessarily the case. It would allow you to load up a bunch of VR content or virtual machines and just leave them sitting in the background idle.
On the contrary, I think that's a fantastic use case for a ton of RAM. Maybe rather than one single unfathomably large image loaded into Photoshop, you could have many reasonably-large images loaded. You don't have to be actively processing them just to take advantage of RAM; they could be sitting in the background.
Same with browser tabs/processes which could collectively take up a ton of RAM but don't necessarily need to be actively running intensive processing at any given moment.
What I'm envisioning is that you'd never have to close files or programs again. Instead you can organize your workflow using virtual desktops/workspaces and similar setups, allowing you to hop between tasks quickly, and without having to reopen/re-process files when doing so.
It makes some data science tasks much easier. Being able to store 100GB data sets in memory is pretty nice once you've got used to it.