You could disable Turbo and EIST in the BIOS - most will have a setting for these, and that will result in the cores running at nominal freq.
I don't know about a nice high-level linux interface, there may well be one, but if you need to access these settings from a running machine there are MSRs you can poke.
You’re surely right about the incentives at play, and why no intelligence agency is going to spend millions doing x company’s validation work for them. But how in the world would selective patching work? How do you hide that?
Is the laptop using the HPET for the QPC timer? (10MHz..) and the added latency[0] of calling into that is messing up the reported timings in the profiler?
It may seem that way, but at least here in the UK homelessness is a huge problem in the immigrant community. It is virtually invisible though. You can get kicked out of the UK as a migrant (even from the EU) for being homeless, so keeping a low profile is essential.
I'm not even sure they're going to let you program the FPGA drectly (with HDL)?
I expect the main workflow will be using OpenCL to offload arbitrary work to the coprocessor along with a few Intel-provided modules capable of common tasks.
The great thing about having the FPGA on-die via UPI is that the cache-coherency, decreased latency and massive bandwidth will allow much more granular offloading of work. This is as compared with PCIe coprocessor where it only makes sense to offload larger chunks of work and minimise the communication and data passing between the two.
The greater the granularity of work that we can offload, the more viable the OpenCL/high-level synthesis/heterogeneous computing type stuff will be, as it will integrate more seamlessly into existing software development methods. This is the holy grail at the moment for FGPA vendors: to get to the point where software developers can program them on their own.
As to your point though I guess we'll find out soon what the dev tools for this will actually look like.
The flip side of that is, if they are stronger than us, many would take it for granted that they would attempt to communicate with us, even though we've made no such attempt to do the same with species on our own planet.
The high taxes for cigarettes (and similarly alcohol) should also be taken into account when considering net gains/losses. According to this [1] in the uk at least the taxes more than cover it for tobacco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylkbjjykgG4&list=RDylkbjjykg...