Intel: CPU patch has minimal impact in the real-world

[HEXUS]

But Intel released Coffee Lake, and its CEO sold millions of shares, knowing of issues.

Read more.

[ByteMyAscii]

Not even close to "minimal impact".
Look at all 4 statements.

Apple - listing cherry-picked artificial benchmarks, which are simply ignoring everything that those benchmarks don't test.
Microsoft - forced patching of the affected areas to mitigate the issue.
Amazon - what about the "minority".
Google - again if the majority are only affected negligibly, what about the minority.

[Corky34]

Seems odd for Microsoft to say nothing to see hear as their customers are reporting problems with their virtual machines.

[Phage]

Not even close to "minimal impact".
Look at all 4 statements.

Apple - listing cherry-picked artificial benchmarks, which are simply ignoring everything that those benchmarks don't test.
Microsoft - forced patching of the affected areas to mitigate the issue.
Amazon - what about the "minority".
Google - again if the majority are only affected negligibly, what about the minority.

They are clearly protecting their own Server/Cloud/Other businesses

[philehidiot]

I honestly expect that ~90% of their customers will notice no difference whatsoever. Those running specific workloads will have problems but hopefully once the hole is sealed there will be optimisations released which will mitigate the impact. At the moment everyone is panicking for no justifiable reason. Wait and see what the real world impact actually is. At the moment we've got Which magazine putting crap all over Facebook implying that people will all experience around a 30% performance hit rather than explaining this was a synthetic benchmark on an OS that hardly any of their readers will use and employing a workload in a setting they're even less likely to use. Once the hole is sealed, they can work on optimisations for those people who are really impacted. For gamers, this just appears to be a non issue for the time being. We just need to be less dramatic about this - the security hole is clearly a major issue. The fallout should be manageable although there are some people who are going to have to use the opportunity to switch to Ryzen. In that case, I would say they should be reimbursed by a class action or something similar.

EDIT: What is going to happen to Intel is that people will probably stop buying their CPUs until new architecture comes out fixing the flaw. By the sounds of it, AMD won't have such issues.

EDIT EDIT: I do wonder if the CEO will be investigated for selling his shares with insider knowledge??

[outwar6010]

I thought this was the emergency fix and not the full one which is expected to cause a bigger difference... Also Hardware unboxed noticed fairly big differences in their m.2 speeds post patch.

[Corky34]

I honestly expect that ~90% of their customers will notice no difference whatsoever. Those running specific workloads will have problems but hopefully once the hole is sealed there will be optimisations released which will mitigate the impact. At the moment everyone is panicking for no justifiable reason. Wait and see what the real world impact actually is. At the moment we've got Which magazine putting crap all over Facebook implying that people will all experience around a 30% performance hit rather than explaining this was a synthetic benchmark on an OS that hardly any of their readers will use and employing a workload in a setting they're even less likely to use. Once the hole is sealed, they can work on optimisations for those people who are really impacted. For gamers, this just appears to be a non issue for the time being. We just need to be less dramatic about this - the security hole is clearly a major issue. The fallout should be manageable although there are some people who are going to have to use the opportunity to switch to Ryzen. In that case, I would say they should be reimbursed by a class action or something similar.

I agree most people won't notice a difference however it's going to take a long time to seal some, or all, of the holes and until they are sealed the workarounds are going to have a noticeable impact on performance in some workloads, that will improve overtime as currently the fixes/workarounds are probably taking a scorched earth approach, that will take time to change as software developers will need to rewrite their code to excluded certain data from speculative execution.

[kalniel]

I thought this was the emergency fix and not the full one which is expected to cause a bigger difference... Also Hardware unboxed noticed fairly big differences in their m.2 speeds post patch.

I read it the other way around - this patch has the biggest impact, which will be mitigated more in future patches. Noticing an impact in m.2 speeds isn't the same thing as seeing much of a real-world impact.

[Xlucine]

I thought this was the emergency fix and not the full one which is expected to cause a bigger difference... Also Hardware unboxed noticed fairly big differences in their m.2 speeds post patch.

If the emergency fix fills the hole, and has less performance impact than the full fix, why bother developing the full fix? The rushed-out-in-six-months fix we've got now can only be slower than any further fixes.

[Wolfclaw]

CEO sells up, smells like insider trading !

[aidanjt]

Noticing an impact in m.2 speeds isn't the same thing as seeing much of a real-world impact.

It would if your real world application is heavily disk I/O bound.

[Corky34]

Interestingly heavy disk I/O seems to be all up in the air, PCPer did some testing and found both losses and oddly some configurations saw gains, it's all very confusing.

[kompukare]

So much for only Meltdown causing a slowdown though.

This user on Reddit ran Realbench with the Windows patch and again with the patch and BIOS microcode update (which is AFAIK only for the Spectre bugs):
https://np.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace...atch_and_bios/

The imaging results look rather bad at over -21%.
Interesting but RealBench is hardly a good benchmark.


Huge CPU usage increase when Epic Games upgraded one of their servers for Meltdown

https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/f...ability-update

Guess, there might be little reason for a gaming server to be super secure so they might not need the patch. Eventually anyway, once they separate their concerns so that another server handles authentication etc. and then the server serving only games can be left less secure. But that kind of work is not instant.

Seems one one of the methods the Linux kernel guys want to use is pretty useless on Skylake+ (Skylake, Kabylake, Coffeelake etc.) as it gets optimised?
Retpoline as a mitigation strategy swaps indirect branches for returns,
to avoid using predictions which come from the BTB, as they can be
poisoned by an attacker.

The problem with Skylake+ is that an RSB underflow falls back to using a
BTB prediction, which allows the attacker to take control of speculation.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/4/724

So, 'minimal' real world impact as long as you're not running any of those loads.

[Corky34]

The thing is it seems some benchmark software will need to be rewritten because of the way these vulnerabilities are being mitigated, currently some (most?) benchmarks hammer the very thing that was exploitable and the fixes have hobbled that, most everyday workloads don't hammer a processors local memory so when a context switch does happen the penalty is relatively small, however if, as it seems benchmarks are doing, you perform lots of context switching those small delays add up.

[ETR316]

I thought this was the emergency fix and not the full one which is expected to cause a bigger difference... Also Hardware unboxed noticed fairly big differences in their m.2 speeds post patch.

full patch is out, you are using it

[Mchotpoon]

I'm running an I5 processor are there any benchmarks showing performance impact while streaming pron? It's the biggest workload for my PC and I'm sure a real world task many users would be interested to see...