The blog entry states: "(For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, we can assume that SMT is worthwhile for us.)" This is also coming from utoronto.ca - so.

The blog entry states: "(For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, we can assume that SMT is worthwhile for us.)" This is also coming from utoronto.ca - so... I guess the question I would have is actually more along the lines of whether there are actually adverse effects from exploiting SMT to snoop on other processes? Is this going to be a whole lot of engineering students doing finite analysis homework? If so, what do you get out of an SMT exploit? There are probably a lot easier ways to cheat on your homework. Are they doing analysis of medical data that hasn't yet been anonymized? Perhaps that's a bigger deal. Maybe. 1. There is no such thing as perfect security 2. Security is an economic decision. You have to know what you stand to lose before you decide if buying 2x the number of processors and disabling SMT is worth it.