[SOLVED] Intel Loses 5X More Average Performance Than AMD From Mitigations: Report

Solution
The "panic" here is:

A low level vulnerability is found.
The only way to mitigate it is to disable some built in functionality, the HyperThreading.
Doing this would result in some theoretical performance loss.
Loss of performance is greater in Intel vs AMD, and brings the Intel performance almost down to the level of the AMD. Therefore, Intel sux

Panic panic panic...

To date, no actual exploit has been seen. Either in the wild or in theory.
D

Deleted member 14196

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I wouldn’t buy intel processor for any amount of money. That’s what you get sloppy engineering
 
I just had a flashback to the principaled technologies benchmarks.

To recap: Intel paid for a company called Principaled technologies (PT) to compare Intel CPUs to AMDs. Intel's point was to prove that Intel was loads better than AMD. The benchmarks that PT yielded were one sided and unfair. AMD was crippled by slow memory, stock coolers, and, in some cases, disabled cores. Intel CPUs obiously had all cores enables and aftermarket tower coolers.

Never, ever, trust in house studies or sponsored studies by any company. It doesnt matter if it is AMD, Intel, NVIDIA or anyone else in any industry. The benchmarks may be accurate, however they usually are at minimum somewhat misleading or dont tell the other side to the story.

I trust info from places like Gamers Nexus, toms hardware, or hardware unboxed.
 
Yeeeeeeep.

Pretty-much the same strategies ms was using in the 90's and early-mid-00's......buy loads of advertising space in the tech press, and hold it over the heads of publications when it came time to review and compare ms offerings with other products. Then came the "genius stroke" of in-house testing.

Those who actually knew the facts weren't fooled, but had nowhere near the platform exposure to ever get past the signal to noise ratio.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
"Loses 5X More Average Performance "

Actually reading the text:
3% vs 16%
"From a performance perspective, the overhead of the mitigations narrow the gap between Intel and AMD's processors. "
"While there are minor differences between the systems to consider, the mitigation impact is enough to draw the Core i7 8700K much closer to the Ryzen 7 2700X and the Core i9 7980XE to the Threadripper 2990WX. "

So the Intel still bests the AMD, just 'not as much as before'.

In addition, this report doesn't specify performance in what. Games, database access, file manipulation, IPS...
 
I would like to see more benchmarks in windows at least.
I think if you look at 2 competing mid range cpus, the 9400f and 2600x, currently the I5 is maybe 1-2% better overall in gaming. This is even after a couple of the patches.
If the latest patches decrease performance even a bit, i think intel would have lost both the low end and mid range to Ryzen.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I'm curious:

As we all know, some people are loath to apply patches of any sort, be it hardware, firmware, OS, whatever.
Some go to major lengths to prevent Microsoft from patching their OS.

Given that...have any actual user facing exploits been seen in the wild? Either among the patched systems, or unpatched.
Spectre, MeltDown, ZombieLoad....any of these hardware and microcode vulnerabilities...anything beyond a proof of concept?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I havent seen any reports of anyone effected by this yet.
It was intel that found it after all.
I guess now that intel found a way someone could exploit their cpus design, some people might take notice and try such a thing.
And the previous Meltdown and Spectre was long ago...given that there are still some systems out there that are vulnerable to those, surely we would have seen reports of hacks or breakins....:)

Additionally, what verifiable user facing performance hits have we seen, post patch?
Anything at all?
 
I trust info from places like Gamers Nexus, toms hardware, or hardware unboxed.
I would like to see more benchmarks in windows at least.
I think if you look at 2 competing mid range cpus, the 9400f and 2600x, currently the I5 is maybe 1-2% better overall in gaming. This is even after a couple of the patches.
If the latest patches decrease performance even a bit, i think intel would have lost both the low end and mid range to Ryzen.
"currently the I5 is maybe 1-2% better overall in gaming"
Only if you are completely bottlenecked by the GPU.
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3407-intel-i5-9600k-cpu-review-vs-2700-2600-8700k
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nicholas70

Reputable
May 15, 2016
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It is my understanding that these 'fixes' can be disabled, and honestly if you're just using a computer for gaming why not? I mean what are the odds of a flaw in your cpu resulting in your system getting hacked? If indeed you got hacked and you mainly just used the system for gaming I doubt it'd be a big deal anyway. I will say I do think Intel should up their standards and QA game though as it seems it has been slipping for sometime now.
 
So there's a, at worst, 16-ish % penalty that is significant. I don't believe it will affect a wide array of applications people commonly uses (I hope), but the talks from Apple about telling customers to just turn off HT is brutal. For better or for worse, Apple has a cult-like following and if Apple says "HT bad; turn it off", Intel is going to have a real PR headache to deal with, haha.

Anyway, most of these security vulnerabilities are cancer for data centers first (or critical services connected to the web) than end users like us. Most can live with bogus/dangerous HT enabled to justify Intel asking for a premium for the feature. Which reminds me... Will there be any lawsuits for this? :eek:

Cheers!
 
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Interesting read. It says "The MDS/Zombieload mitigation cost on the dual Xeon 6138 server was noticeable, but at least not as bad as what we saw on some of the Intel desktop systems or even the E3-1275 v6 in some of the scenarios. And at least the new Cascade Lake Xeon server CPUs do not need any additional/new protection against MDS."
I have a question tho. How do cpus released a few months ago have hardware midigation for a bug found more recently?
Other then by chance, how did Intel fix a bug in some CPUs before the bug was known about? then how did they know that they fixed the bug in certain cpus earlier?
 

TJ Hooker

Titan
Ambassador
I have a question tho. How do cpus released a few months ago have hardware midigation for a bug found more recently?
Other then by chance, how did Intel fix a bug in some CPUs before the bug was known about? then how did they know that they fixed the bug in certain cpus earlier?
AFAIK all of these CPU vulnerabilities discovered in the last year or so relate to speculative execution. It doesn't seem unreasonable that mitigations put in place to fix one exploit involving SE may incidentally end up covering other vulnerabilities relating to SE.