Question What is #1 on any list of CPU attributes?

[akamateau]

Tom's Hardware and other media sites are always making lists. Especially what is the best CPU to spend hard earned money on.

This question should help Tom's writers to better define these cpu's as consumers should determine what is important to them.

Intel sells cpu's the same way that Detroit used to sell cars. Intel is always trying to push the fastest and best performing silicon on to the consumer. Yet these cpu's like the cars sold by Detroit all had flaws that put the public at risk. Cars were poorly designed and unsafe.

Intel silicon is also poorly designed and unsafe. There is always a new vulnerability that exposes the consumer to malicious attack and loss of data.

Yet these vulnerabilities do not appear to cause any sense of outrage by the online media!

What good is the best performing CPU if it can not secure your data and passwords?

What good is producing so-called firmware "fixes" that never get applied or used during benchmarks?

 

[Phaaze88]

These security flaws primarily affect enterprises and datacenters, not so much home/personal pcs. As far as hackers are concerned, the former leaves the greatest impact, as well as being 'where the money's at'.
Also,

...to exploit these flaws somehow you literally need to give someone access to your system either physically or remotely.

So unless OP works for, or runs one of these big businesses... don't worry about it so much. Basic security practices should help keep one from becoming a target.
Hacks are usually caused by PEBKACs anyways.

 

[coastie65]

The original question was what do I look for in a Processor, in a word Performance. One of the first things that caught my attention, what is the out of the box speed without OCing. My last one was a Skylake, i7 6700 @ 4.0 Ghz out of the box ( turbo was higher of course ). Now I am running one that is 3.7 Ghz out of the Box, but is a Hex Core ( i7 8700 ). It actually out performs the last one and the uptick was worth the cost. That is another thing, will the performance boost be worth the cost? AMD is finally back in the game and at a lower cost. As for security, nothing is 100% secure, so it is up to you. I turn off the Remote stuff as well as set the DEP. Haven't found that stuff in Windows 10 yet. I don't keep anything on here such as banking or that sort of thing. There is noting in here that would be of any interest except games perhaps. Do your home work and read. You are looking for the best performance you can get for your budget.

 

[AllanGH]

Hacks are usually caused by PEBKACs anyways.

Usually....and the more paranoid ones at that. Then you have the ID10t errors as well.....

 

[InvalidError]

"While not good security flaws come up it has to be taken in context."
That is what Intel keeps saying to you.
Intel has also been saying to you that their CPU's are secure.
If a lie is repeated enough times then it gains a truth all of it's own.
Your passworded data is on dozens of severs that are running on insecure Intel CPU's.

Despite all those flaws, Intel's CPUs are still more secure than most software running on them. You cannot exploits MDS-style flaws without finely tuned exploit code which is only achievable by locally running binary code. Don't run safety-critical tasks on machines that run client binaries and these exploits become non-issues as would-be attackers would be stuck at the gaining access to run said code step.

If someone gains binary code access to a system they shouldn't have access to, you usually have far worse security issues to worry about. Also, these exploits are only proofs of concept - they have been proven technically feasible under ideal conditions (continuously repeating the same few transactions to give the exploit every possible chance to accumulate statistics and succeed) but unlikely to be practical on a real system where multiple different transactions and other processes are in flight at any given time and they are mostly low repeatability if not one-shot events. Making sense of this much noise would require an amount of storage and processing power unlikely to go unnoticed.

 

[TerryLaze]

The most popular thing is always the most vulnerable just because it's the one that is being attacked the most,it's under the highest amount of scrutiny.
Nobody cares to even search for vulnerabilities in ryzen because they make up like 1% of all CPUs,it's not worth it, but everybody is going to search for them in intel because they make up all of the market.