@cwebber Oh, I would certainly advocate for libre hardware. What I was replying to was your original message:

> Would you buy/use a computer that ran 3x slower than modern machines if it were more secure (less vulnerable to side-channel attacks)?

I interpreted this as buying a modern e.g. Intel processor that has Meltdown/Spectre microcode mitigations, which can cut performance of certain processes by half (which we have to deal with at work).

But RISC-V is another story. We actually gain something substantial there.