Dell and Alienware release their most powerful laptops ever

[HEXUS]

Dell XPS 15 and Alienware 17, with 8th Gen Intel CPUs, sit on those respective thrones.

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[philehidiot]

Question - do these chips have hardware based Spectre / Meltdown protection or are they reliant on the patches? If they rely on patches then you'd be mad to buy them. Especially if the SSD is NVMe where performance impact of the patches is huge.

[3dcandy]

No hardware based protection yet as far as I know

[scaryjim]

The 8th Gen H chips are the same silicon as desktop Coffee Lake, afaik, so no hardware mitigations against spec ex attacks. And, as someone's said in another thread, now the concept of side-channel attacks against speculative execution has been proven we'll get into a long running arms war as people discover new ways to exploit the behaviour. I suspect it will be a long time before anyone works out how to perform speculative execution without it being susceptible to some form of attack...

Worth noting that while the XPS 15 2-in-1 does use an 8th gen chip, it's a quad core Kaby G, not a hexa-core Cofffee Lake - although it might be the first major OEM we've seen with the Kaby G chips in a device, which makes it really quite interesting...