paleking

I guess it depends entirely on how closely AMD plans on matching Intel's current pricing hierarchies. The 8C/16T Ryzen may be as high as $600/$700 - still a $300 discount on an 80-85% performance match with Kabylake, and thus still very attractive to most consumers. AMD doesn't have any fabs to make their own chips anymore, meaning it will cut into each chip's profitability; so every chip's price will matter. $400 for their top end is wishful thinking, I fear...

How old is the PSU?

Hi Schischka, That's exactly the thought - most performance benefits over time can be a huge saver on battery-life; hence why I'm interested with SED over standard NVMe. To my understanding, encryption vs non-encrypted speeds can depend on a variety of factors, including encryption type, and complexity; but SED - at least on paper - seems to offer quite a significant performance benefit over software-encryption alone. But it is a shiny new technology, so few people may have any interaction with it.

Hi Granular, Yeah, no issues at all with using software-based encryption; it works and is well-supported, which are huge factors in day-to-day usage, but I'm curious about SED. My thought is more poised surrounding performance and effective usability; if there's a hypothetical 30% cost difference between a standard NVMe and a SED NVMe, but only a 1% performance benefit, then it can be easily dismissed, but if it's performance benefit is greater than it's cost difference, that's a conversation to be had... Without knowing your specific laptop make and model, I'm only guessing here, but that sounds like a Bitlocker-style encryption method, which does encrypt and then de-encrypts the entire drive each time at startup. Not sure, but the speed of that may depend on the complexity and type of encryption used; less complex being quicker to 'solve' and vice-versa. I believe that the reason that there isn't a hardware-level implementation as you described is because volumes are recognised at the BIOS level as different to whole drives, in a similar way as a parent folder is different to a child / sub folder. So I think that you always require a higher-than-BIOS level software to treat hidden volumes correctly, or in that use-case.

Hi All, This is my first topic on LTT forums, so sincere apologies if this is the wrong place to post this, or if it has been asked previously - I did attempt a search prior to posting! I've been looking over specs released to me today by Dell for their support for NVMe drives for future Latitude laptops, and was curious if anyone has any experiences using Self-Encrypting (SED) NVMe SSD's, and whether there's a tangible real-world performance gain, over using existing software-based encryption methods with a standard NVMe drive. Not asking for specific experiences with Dell-only hardware, but just any interactions with SED; appreciate it's a brand new technology, but thought this would be the best community to hit for potential information. Thanks in advance guys! PaleKing