Spectre Patch Causes 'Significant Slowdown' On Older OS, Chips

[husker]

Since not all CPU's are effected in the same way, all CPU comparison benchmark tests ever done on Tom's and elsewhere are potentially wrong.

 

[ammaross]

Tom's needs to apply these patches and redo all their Intel and AMD CPU benchmarks. This makes all their metrics obsolete unless we just apply a -10% to all Intel benches for anything that isn't gaming just to guess...

 

[danwat1234]

Just don't patch your system. Then no performance degradation. Don't be stupid on the web and it'll be fine.

 

[psiboy]

@lucian_armasu
"Using top-of-the line Core i7-8700K consumer CPU with six-cores and 12 threats, a fast Intel 600p M.2 NVMe SSD" Yep I'd say you have 12 "Threats" if you have this CPU given the meltdown flaw! ROFLMAO!

Every benchmark show intel 600 series ssd's as some of the slowest on the planet and with a nasty feature that locks the drive when it thinks it's nearing the end of it's read write life!

I have been with Tom's Hardware since it's inception (1996) and it's crap articles like this that are 1. A beat up. 2. Clearly funded by Intel. 3. The incredible amount of ads you have now, that see me very rarely returning here. WCCF a site commonly accused of being a rumour mill is actually less biased.

I think it's just nostalgia that brings me back from time to time only to be invetiably disappointed with insanely beaten up and blatantly biased articles like this!

 

[dorianh94]

So how long did Intel exactly know about this issue? It entirely possible that Intel designed the chip with this flaw on purpose to get the extra performance. Imagine if the 2000 series had a 30% drop in performance. It puts them pretty close to AMD at the time in fact. These finding just make everything seem even more sketchy. It's entirely possible that after Intel's bribing of OEMs, they pulled off an even scummier move in intentionally speeding up their processors regardless of security.

It is highly unlikely that a hardware fix for this problem will have the same performance penalties as the software patch does. Also, Intel has had no competition from AMD for the last 10(?) years, so had no reason not to go ahead and fix this, had they discovered it.

 

[dorianh94]

Don't fool yourself. Intel knew about the exploit known to us as Spectre for a long time, because they are responsible for making it. This cannot be truly patched up by some Windows and microcode updates. Unless Intel comes up with an entirely new architecture which eliminates this on hardware level, it cannot be undone. They left all their users open to external attacks for years and still charged damn premium for their chips. How can anyone justify this? If you think they are innocent, then you are either a fanboy or don't know nothing about Intel as a company....and I don't blame you. I blame them.

 

[boju]

Don't fool yourself. Intel knew about the exploit known to us as Spectre for a long time, because they are responsible for making it. This cannot be truly patched up by some Windows and microcode updates. Unless Intel comes up with an entirely new architecture which eliminates this on hardware level, it cannot be undone. They left all their users open to external attacks for years and still charged damn premium for their chips. How can anyone justify this? If you think they are innocent, then you are either a fanboy or don't know nothing about Intel as a company....and I don't blame you. I blame them.

It's not just Intel. Noone knows for sure who is to blame or how it came about. Maybe Intel did know and thought something like this would be nearly impossible to take advantage of. But since it's been brought to everyone's attention, the flaw needs to be addressed just to be sure.

Artificial intelligence and deep learning is becoming. Wouldn't be surprised the flaw was discovered this way.

 

[John_833]

Definately felt my older Hazwell 4130 suffered the most in performance loss.

 

[dgk1953]

Upgrade? Nah,time to disable updates IMO. I have a 6700k rig I built in Sept 2016 and NO,I'm not tossing half of it out and spending another grand because of Intel and their share DUMPING CEO.

 

[alextheblue]

I've also heard Ubuntu systems were having issues booting after their initial Meltdown/Spectre update. Big mess all around.