PATCHES FOR SPECTRE AND MELTDOWN REDUCE PERFORMANCE OF INTEL PROCESSORS 5 TIMES

ORIGINAL CONTENT: https://www.securitynewspaper.com/2019/05/21/patches-for-spectre-and-meltdown-reduce-performance-of-intel-processors-5-times/

Since the vulnerabilities of Spectre and Meltdown appeared, specialists in information security services anticipated that implementing software fixes for these flaws implied a decrease in the performance of a system, although due to the new information related to this type of cyber errors the exact impact is still unknown, and there is still not enough information to test whether the impact is the same on both Intel and AMD computers.

To find answers to this question, a group of information security services specialists have performed several tests on Intel developments.

In total, the specialists analyzed five different Intel chips, concluding that, in general, enabling all security patches reduces performance by an average of 15% on all CPUS with the Hyper Threading function enabled, while the disabling of this technology increases the impact of CPU performance to 20% on average.

On the other hand, AMD CPUS have an impact of around 3% with all the protections enabled; Note that it is not necessary to disable the Hyper Threading function on AMD chips.

So far, there are no known cases in the wild in which the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities have impacted some development of AMD in addition to Epyc; however, the company has made no mention of a hypothetical invulnerability against these failures, because, according to specialists in information security services, there is no guarantee that products released in the future by this company do not require corrections that impact their performance significantly.

However, according to the specialists from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS), if these problems keep affecting to greater extent Intel developments it will increase the controversial performance comparison between this company and AMD.

Because the risk of these vulnerabilities exists only at the theoretical level by now, it is not clear how cautious Intel development operators are, what’s known so far is that the complete implementation of corrections significantly reduces the CPU performance, especially in the company’s latest products.