No, it's optional in the sense of you choosing to enable it. I also suspect the performance hit will be minimal, however I'm not an expert. > If those improve

No, it's optional in the sense of you choosing to enable it. I also suspect the performance hit will be minimal, however I'm not an expert. > If those improvements are deemed incompatible with being able to securely run JS in your browser, I would argue Intel is having a very fundamental problem now. Well it is, yet people are overwhelmingly willing to expose a turing complete language controlled by some 3rd party they know little or nothing about directly to the open internet. The problem there is nothing to do with hardware. It's people. (agreed about AMD)