Intel Issues Meltdown, Spectre Patches For Newer CPUs

[Lucian Armasu]

Intel announced that it has started issuing Meltdown and Spectre updates to manufacturers, which should send their updates their customers by the end of the week. However, only five years old or newer CPUs will be patched, leaving some chips vulnerable.

Intel Issues Meltdown, Spectre Patches For Newer CPUs : Read more

 

[anotherdrew]

Some say these patches might affect performance. Has anyone done any testing?

 

[Patrick_Bateman]

It does in synthetics based on some preliminary benchmarks posted on another tech site, but not so much in real-world applications.

 

[thrakazog]

Hardware Unboxed tested the 8700k (post patch) with win 10. The only thing that showed any real change was SSD performance. You can see the tests here....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qZksorJAuY

 

[Sinko]

Testing on my own system using the normal CPU stress tests yielded no change. Ran tests many times. Test results are useless to post as I stated before, no change.

 

[tamalero]

Some say these patches might affect performance. Has anyone done any testing?

Won't affect every day people.

Might affect emulation heavily.
Will also affect heavily certain work types on servers (like databases and VMs)

 

[mikeynavy1976]

Well, rather than wait until my machines could pick it up on automatic Windows Update, I went and downloaded/installed it via the circulating Microsoft Update Catalog link. Initial impressions after install, especially on laptops, was a bit concerning...they ran at 100% for a while and core temps hit 100C. I'll keep an eye on them but, fortunately, my desktop seems to be "stabilizing" and clock speeds are starting to fluctuate again and temps have dropped (desktop core temps were around 75C w/ Corsair H60 and no overclock). Readings are looking a lot more normal now. That being said, I didn't run any benchmarks but real-world performance doesn't seem affected...everything else in Windows and application speed seem to be unaffected.

 

[rds1220]

So there won't be much of a performance hit for us gamers?

 

[Supernova1138]

So there won't be much of a performance hit for us gamers?

As far as the Meltdown bug is concerned, no it doesn't look like it. Games mostly run inside the user space and don't make all that many syscalls, so the fix for Meltdown doesn't seem to have much impact for most consumer applications including games. The bigger performance hits will be for server applications and to a lesser extent people with really fast storage, NVMe drives do take a small hit to their benchmarks with the patch.

The Spectre bug could be a bigger problem if Intel and AMD do decide the only way to mitigate this problem is to disable branch prediction entirely. That could lead to a big across the board performance drop for everybody.

 

[rds1220]

So there won't be much of a performance hit for us gamers?

As far as the Meltdown bug is concerned, no it doesn't look like it. Games mostly run inside the user space and don't make all that many syscalls, so the fix for Meltdown doesn't seem to have much impact for most consumer applications including games. The bigger performance hits will be for server applications and to a lesser extent people with really fast storage, NVMe drives do take a small hit to their benchmarks with the patch.

The Spectre bug could be a bigger problem if Intel and AMD do decide the only way to mitigate this problem is to disable branch prediction entirely. That could lead to a big across the board performance drop for everybody.

Just got an NVME drive figures now this will happen and mess up performance

 

[Supernova1138]

So there won't be much of a performance hit for us gamers?

As far as the Meltdown bug is concerned, no it doesn't look like it. Games mostly run inside the user space and don't make all that many syscalls, so the fix for Meltdown doesn't seem to have much impact for most consumer applications including games. The bigger performance hits will be for server applications and to a lesser extent people with really fast storage, NVMe drives do take a small hit to their benchmarks with the patch.

The Spectre bug could be a bigger problem if Intel and AMD do decide the only way to mitigate this problem is to disable branch prediction entirely. That could lead to a big across the board performance drop for everybody.

Just got an NVME drive figures now this will happen and mess up performance

Fortunately the hit doesn't seem to be too big in Windows, the benches I've seen for NVMe drives was about a 2-7% drop in random reads/writes. So not a catastrophic loss, you're still going to be getting considerably more performance than a SATA SSD.

 

[phobicsq]

What a crock.... meanwhile people have screwed up chips, loss of performance, and I bet no compensation. Intel should HAVE to replace any chips that people bought that are affected to new chips that aren't.

 

[FredSchaeffer]

Does anyone know if this would be an issue on a laptop using an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U? Thanks!

 

[rds1220]

What a crock.... meanwhile people have screwed up chips, loss of performance, and I bet no compensation. Intel should HAVE to replace any chips that people bought that are affected to new chips that aren't.

That is completely unrealistic. Meltdown is thought to affect every Intel processors manufactured since 1995, excluding the company’s Itanium server chips and Atom processors before 2013. You are talking about millions and millions of CPU's. If Intel tried to replace all of them it would kill the company.

 

[Viking2121]

Meltdown patch that I'm able to download from Microsoft's website for Windows 8.1 I saw no performance drops, SSD 4k reads and writes were sorta affected but not enough to worry about. This patch also has no ill affects on my other All in One PC with a Pentium G620. Meltdown I also herd you will need to update bios which both of my PC's have no newer bios yet.

As for Specter, I'll wait and see what they will do about that, But as far as I know you need physical access to the computer or even remote access to exploit the flaw, again I don't know to much details on this, but if that is the case, I will not install the Specter fix if it affects performance as I never use remote access and I never let anyone use my PC but myself. Could all change after they figure out more things about the issue.

 

[rds1220]

Saw this today. Seems the update from Microsoft is causing AMD based machines to give a BSOD or not boot up at all.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3246189/security/microsoft-halts-meltdown-patches-windows-amd-pcs-unbootable.html

 

[Soaptrail]

If we build our own PC how do we get a patch through the maker of our device? I keep reading about Intel patches yet i cannot find them.

 

[TJ Hooker]

If we build our own PC how do we get a patch through the maker of our device? I keep reading about Intel patches yet i cannot find them.

OS patch from Microsoft (or Linus, Apple, etc), BIOS update from mobo manufacturer once released.

 

[thuck777]

I am not willing to sacrifice the kind of performance noted for my Windows 7 laptop running a Sandy Bridge i7 CPU. That is stupid, especially given that there really is NO threat. Now that so many systems are going to be updated, there is little reason for any scumbags to try to exploit these vulnerabilities, IMO. From my perspective, the cure is far worse than the disease, especially on older hardware / OS combinations. It just is not worth it. So, I believe Microsoft should make a way to have these patches be OPTIONAL and AVOIDABLE and UNINSTALLABLE. This is crap!

 

[steveis2]

If we build our own PC how do we get a patch through the maker of our device? I keep reading about Intel patches yet i cannot find them.

I suspect that people like us who have built theri own systems are at the bottom of the line from the point of view of large multinational companies. There are going to be a lot of people with older but not ancient hardware that works perfectly well but doesn't get a patch as there won't be a motherboard update available. More IT junk to be recycled no doubt.

Steve

 

[evilwidder]

My Intel Core I7 4790K did 847 points on Cinebench R15 before the patch. Now it does 837, so I assume the performance got a bit down. But that is a small loss, not a problem because High-End CPU's won't lose so much power. The problem becomes when using programs/applications. Since meltdown and spectre patch, videogames that use Battle-Eye Anticheat get random "bad_module_info has stopped working" crashes. Also some older programs fail to execute properly after the patch. This patch does not only affect performance, it also affects stability and reliability.

 

[Viking2121]

I am not willing to sacrifice the kind of performance noted for my Windows 7 laptop running a Sandy Bridge i7 CPU. That is stupid, especially given that there really is NO threat. Now that so many systems are going to be updated, there is little reason for any scumbags to try to exploit these vulnerabilities, IMO. From my perspective, the cure is far worse than the disease, especially on older hardware / OS combinations. It just is not worth it. So, I believe Microsoft should make a way to have these patches be OPTIONAL and AVOIDABLE and UNINSTALLABLE. This is crap!

I agree with you, But to be honest, this bug really only seems to affect server side workloads more than the average consumer, All of the tests I've done on my Machine and a few others I have not seen 1 bit of a performance drop. On my aunts i7 3770s and a GTX780ti with Windows 10 Pro x64 build 1709, she has not seen any performance drops in many of the games she plays or the workloads she puts on the machine. CPU usage also has not changed. Though she was complaining about Second Life being laggy more than normal, I read up about that and it seems to be affecting server side things but nothing to do with the clients end.

I've been installing all the updates as they roll in on windows update on windows 8.1 and have not seen any noticeable impact to performance, I got 25,677 On firestrike before patch, After installing the patch I got 25,897, Tests results were consistently higher after the patch.

I don't think you have anything to worry about, other than a few of them programs that are not patched and might throw out errors since its use to how windows did work before, But if I do get a performance drop eventually then I will find the update and get rid of it and post my results.