4 ms·

A modern PC/laptop - one with Zen 4 or Intel 12-14 gen CPU with 8+ cores - has so much spare performance, that it works perfectly well with software encryption

A modern PC/laptop - one with Zen 4 or Intel 12-14 gen CPU with 8+ cores - has so much spare performance, that it works perfectly well with software encryption , defender scanning, memory isolation, security bugs mitigations, etc. Don't know about enterprise IT software - haven't worked in/with big companies lately.

Filligree 3y ago
Sure, if you don't care about battery life at all.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  Or bandwidth.
HPsquared 3y ago
We're talking about latency, mostly. This is about single-thread performance in many cases.
runjake 3y ago
1. A good percentage of corp people do not have these specs. 2. The whole point of the comment was enterprise IT software, and I can confirm it severely impacts the performance of high-spec computers with stuff like 32GB mem and NVMe SSDs.
- kibibu 3y ago
  My work laptop is the lowest performance pc I've ever used, largely due to Windows defender and whatever interactions it has with other software. Sure it streams videos and so on (so cpu performance is OK), but basic stuff like "opening a word doc" or "launching Explorer" takes 10s of seconds. I'm back to waking up my pc and going to get a coffee for 15 minutes so it might be ready to use when I return.
  - runjake 3y ago
    I regularly see systems with 3 different pieces of AV/EDR software running on corporate systems, all at the same time. I may see multiple AV/EDR systems more than I see a system with just one, running.
  - MilStdJunkie 3y ago
    Oh, god. Yeah. With government contracting, it gets just plain surreal, like everything else about working in Defense. Not disk encryption, but my personal nightmare happened a decade ago, when MIS found out I had a data background, and they needed someone to resolve network latency issues, they told me 37k on what was supposedly gigabit ethernet. They pointed me at their security doohickey, the DMS, and a giant pile of pcap files. I had zero idea what I was doing, but I came back with 80% +++ infosec garbage, like, everywhere, even the packets on the factory floor and other dumb metal. I must have checked and rechecked a bazillion times - as mentioned, I really didn't know what any of this stuff was, and relied on text mining and Wikidata. After ganking the entire DMS into my magic widgets, found that there were seventeen network packet analyzer / security products all spooging into the network, all - if I can trust my gensim skills - reporting on each other, because ALL of them were implemented completely separately. Each one was some idiot program manager parroting instructions - forcing network changes - from the customer based on who knows how many deadend procurement officers. And judging from the contract documents, the sniffers were the tip of the iceberg: it was across the board for AV, encryption, email settings, you name it - you probably need to review all of that. It was a mess, but the guy who brought me in - damn, he was a really nice guy, realized that I was a pay grade above janitor at the time, tried to make my life decent - that guy . . he looked actually sick, like, "I-need-a-toilet-right-now" sick. Above him, no one wanted to tell the level above, so we kept getting kicked upstairs until we ended up at E-level and they're calling the Overlords in the corporate office. In the end, nobody wanted to rock the boat, for fear of running afoul of some random procurement officer or other (who could of course become VPs any second, or any quarter they needed a quick sale). And so it remained. As far as I know, their security setup remains unchanged to this day. Ah, that wasn't even the worst of that kind of thing to happen, but that's another story, in an area where I was actually semi-qualified . .
- mickelsen 3y ago
  Yeah, back in 2020-2021 I got a 16" i9 Macbook, objectively better than my own but the amount of software they loaded -we are still talking about MacOS- slowed things down too much. Corporate mandated stuff, compliance software, IT provisioning yadayada, mandatory update reminder app, something that fired an email warning whenever I connected a USB gadget, etc.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Also most of the macOS corporate software is really really poor quality. A lot of this are really poor Windows ports that don't use the Apple native installer, reinvent their own windows registry equivalent instead of just using defaults/ plists, often have UIs straight out of Windows. Terrible crap. I managed macs for years and it was not fun. And I had no choice because all this software was mandated by the security team.
    - mickelsen 3y ago
      I even saw some stuff that was Wine emulated, go figure.
bezier-curve 3y ago
This is not really a CPU issue, it's a disk issue. For a lot of workflows, windows already has inferior I/O performance compared to Linux even with AV disabled, so more on by default security features is not exactly helpful for developers.
xnx 3y ago
There is undoubtedly a lot of power in recent machines, but I think a lot of these processes are single core and serial: e.g. performance penalty from CPU security mitigations -> performance penalty to decrypt files off disk -> performance penalty to virus scan every file as it is read
diarrhea 3y ago
This take ignores that software evolves to be ever more bloated as well. With ever more hardware to throw at issues, software didn’t have enough evolutionary pressure to remain or become efficient. I argue that’s beginning to show. Look at what our software actually does and the actual resources used in doing so. Compare that to the theoretical minimum required. That ratio has been growing steadily. In the 80s, when your systems were simple and things were Assembly or C, not much efficiency was lost. Nowadays, enormous efficiency is wasted on telemetry, security measures (AV, Spectre etc. mitigations), programming in the name of being cross platform (Electron, …), indirection (APIs calling APIS ad infinitum), …
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I think about this every time I use a computer. I think it's genuinely shameful how we waste most of the amazing computing power even the least expensive of modern machines have.

Filligree 3y ago

Sure, if you don't care about battery life at all.

GeekyBear 3y ago
Or bandwidth.

HPsquared 3y ago

We're talking about latency, mostly. This is about single-thread performance in many cases.

runjake 3y ago

1. A good percentage of corp people do not have these specs. 2. The whole point of the comment was enterprise IT software, and I can confirm it severely impacts the performance of high-spec computers with stuff like 32GB mem and NVMe SSDs.

kibibu 3y ago
My work laptop is the lowest performance pc I've ever used, largely due to Windows defender and whatever interactions it has with other software. Sure it streams videos and so on (so cpu performance is OK), but basic stuff like "opening a word doc" or "launching Explorer" takes 10s of seconds. I'm back to waking up my pc and going to get a coffee for 15 minutes so it might be ready to use when I return.
- runjake 3y ago
  I regularly see systems with 3 different pieces of AV/EDR software running on corporate systems, all at the same time. I may see multiple AV/EDR systems more than I see a system with just one, running.
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  Oh, god. Yeah. With government contracting, it gets just plain surreal, like everything else about working in Defense. Not disk encryption, but my personal nightmare happened a decade ago, when MIS found out I had a data background, and they needed someone to resolve network latency issues, they told me 37k on what was supposedly gigabit ethernet. They pointed me at their security doohickey, the DMS, and a giant pile of pcap files. I had zero idea what I was doing, but I came back with 80% +++ infosec garbage, like, everywhere, even the packets on the factory floor and other dumb metal. I must have checked and rechecked a bazillion times - as mentioned, I really didn't know what any of this stuff was, and relied on text mining and Wikidata. After ganking the entire DMS into my magic widgets, found that there were seventeen network packet analyzer / security products all spooging into the network, all - if I can trust my gensim skills - reporting on each other, because ALL of them were implemented completely separately. Each one was some idiot program manager parroting instructions - forcing network changes - from the customer based on who knows how many deadend procurement officers. And judging from the contract documents, the sniffers were the tip of the iceberg: it was across the board for AV, encryption, email settings, you name it - you probably need to review all of that. It was a mess, but the guy who brought me in - damn, he was a really nice guy, realized that I was a pay grade above janitor at the time, tried to make my life decent - that guy . . he looked actually sick, like, "I-need-a-toilet-right-now" sick. Above him, no one wanted to tell the level above, so we kept getting kicked upstairs until we ended up at E-level and they're calling the Overlords in the corporate office. In the end, nobody wanted to rock the boat, for fear of running afoul of some random procurement officer or other (who could of course become VPs any second, or any quarter they needed a quick sale). And so it remained. As far as I know, their security setup remains unchanged to this day. Ah, that wasn't even the worst of that kind of thing to happen, but that's another story, in an area where I was actually semi-qualified . .
mickelsen 3y ago
Yeah, back in 2020-2021 I got a 16" i9 Macbook, objectively better than my own but the amount of software they loaded -we are still talking about MacOS- slowed things down too much. Corporate mandated stuff, compliance software, IT provisioning yadayada, mandatory update reminder app, something that fired an email warning whenever I connected a USB gadget, etc.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Also most of the macOS corporate software is really really poor quality. A lot of this are really poor Windows ports that don't use the Apple native installer, reinvent their own windows registry equivalent instead of just using defaults/ plists, often have UIs straight out of Windows. Terrible crap. I managed macs for years and it was not fun. And I had no choice because all this software was mandated by the security team.
  - mickelsen 3y ago
    I even saw some stuff that was Wine emulated, go figure.

bezier-curve 3y ago

This is not really a CPU issue, it's a disk issue. For a lot of workflows, windows already has inferior I/O performance compared to Linux even with AV disabled, so more on by default security features is not exactly helpful for developers.

xnx 3y ago

There is undoubtedly a lot of power in recent machines, but I think a lot of these processes are single core and serial: e.g. performance penalty from CPU security mitigations -> performance penalty to decrypt files off disk -> performance penalty to virus scan every file as it is read

diarrhea 3y ago

This take ignores that software evolves to be ever more bloated as well. With ever more hardware to throw at issues, software didn’t have enough evolutionary pressure to remain or become efficient. I argue that’s beginning to show. Look at what our software actually does and the actual resources used in doing so. Compare that to the theoretical minimum required. That ratio has been growing steadily. In the 80s, when your systems were simple and things were Assembly or C, not much efficiency was lost. Nowadays, enormous efficiency is wasted on telemetry, security measures (AV, Spectre etc. mitigations), programming in the name of being cross platform (Electron, …), indirection (APIs calling APIS ad infinitum), …

JohnFen 3y ago
I think about this every time I use a computer. I think it's genuinely shameful how we waste most of the amazing computing power even the least expensive of modern machines have.