zlacker

>>doener+(OP)
If I read that right, they're allowing Intel ME, which sounds like a sad compromise to me. Given that it's a pretty big complex black box that one can't easily disable, would you agree that x86 is doomed when it comes to security? If that's the case, is there any hope we could have a CPU with competitive capabilities? (For example, is there an i7 alternative for ARM?)

What could one do to make it possible to have ME-less x86 in the future?

>>d33+y5
You can't buy a processor with comparable performance to a modern Intel without some kind of scary management engine. AMD has them too and Arm doesn't compete on performance.

>>adrian+76
When you say "performance" do you mean at or below the price point? POWER is open but seriously expensive.

>>horust+69
Oh that's true, I forgot about those. But do they fit in a laptop?

>>adrian+2d
For certain values of "laptop" probably (or "notebook" might be better since I don't know if I'd want to put one on my lap), but I don't think the tradeoffs would be generally worth it right now. As a spec sheet eyeball check, I know there are ultra high performance gaming notebooks that do ridiculous stuff, like Acer makes one IIRC with SLI 1080s and an i7 that is rated to pull up to 330W from the wall, and of course it weighs something like 8-8.5 kg (18-19 lbs). There seem to be ones that "merely" use a single 100-150W desktop class GPU and processor that are more like in the 5.5 kg/12 lbs range, but that's still no fairy (a 15" Macbook Pro for contrast is about 1.8 kg/4 lbs, and even in the mid-90s the big old PowerBooks maxed out around 3.2 kg/7 lbs IIRC) and obviously we're generally going to be talking just a few hours of battery life at best away from mains.

But at any rate it's not unfeasible or unknown right now to deal with 100-200W worth of TDP in big 17" (or even 21"(!!!)) notebooks, and there does seem to be a functional (albeit niche) market for it. So at that range it'd be feasible in principle to stick in a low end POWER8 and smallish but functional GPU and have a "notebook POWER8 system", but it'd be a compromised machine in terms of what we'd normally find desirable in a mobile system.

POWER9 (which I think is still slated to go online in the Summit & Sierra supercomputers this year?) is supposed to have improved energy efficiency and management features, which though aimed at scaleup/scaleout of course might help out a bit in other settings in theory. But even so it'd be a tougher chip to build in an SFF system around let alone a notebook. Any potential buyers would have to care a very great deal about what it brought to the table.