Tech Titans Downplay Meltdown And Spectre Patches' Performance Hits

[Guest]

Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are reporting that their compute performance has been largely unaffected by the patches for Meltdown and Spectre.

Tech Titans Downplay Meltdown And Spectre Patches' Performance Hits : Read more

 

[hellwig]

Linus Torvalds said you could expect a roughly 5% performance hit. If you're running a datacenter with thousands of computers, 5% can be a HUGE hit in terms of power and cooling costs. 5% of your costs just to work around an architecture blunder.

 

[kookykrazee]

So, 5-30% drop is cpu. That is not cool. To say not noticable, for the average user is disingenuous to the users that peruse Toms and Endadget. Most of the users are NOT average users. I will be very upset if I lose UP TO 30% of the CPU usage of my CPU!

 

[bigdragon]

I am curious to see post-patch benchmarks of Intel chips vs. AMD chips. I have a suspicion that Intel's performance advantage may evaporate. This is especially true if AMD is actually immune to Meltdown and therefore does not need performance-impacting patches.

 

[Supernova1138]

I am curious to see post-patch benchmarks of Intel chips vs. AMD chips. I have a suspicion that Intel's performance advantage may evaporate. This is especially true if AMD is actually immune to Meltdown and therefore does not need performance-impacting patches.

From what we've seen so far, as far as the consumer is concerned, there will be no change in how Intel and AMD stack up against each other. Consumer applications like games and video encoding software seem to be pretty much unaffected. The only area where AMD might be able to get a performance lead over Intel out of this would be in the server market, where things like database programs are more likely to take a sizeable performance hit.

 

[-Fran-]

For time critical applications, 5% is massive though.

Plus, come on, you think the big "we want you to move everything to our servers" people would say there's a big impact in their infrastructure due to this? That is why their claims come with big asterisks.

I mean, it's fine they come up front and say it wasn't as bad as it was made out to be, but context is everything.

Cheers!

 

[bentremblay]

I find myself losing a good item for the fact of hearing some operational term but not having it arise as a reference. Would be great value to have appended Glossary with links! UX, right?

 

[msroadkill612]

(Amazon) definitively stated that EC2 customers are protected against Meltdown and both Spectre vulnerabilities.

We don’t know what makes Amazon’s case different as, according to Google, one of the Spectre vulnerabilities doesn’t have an effective fix.

Amazon also said that it had “not observed meaningful performance impact for the overwhelming majority of EC2 workloads.”"

pretty weasel words?

So they admit they HAVE noticed a meaningful impact on some?

their support forum indicates many of their clients have been mucked around terribly by different performance levels, and they were given no notice by amazon.

 

[msroadkill612]

ITS WORKLOAD DEPENDENT, but even a 50% hit is possible for some workloads,

All the apologists are saying is that consumers dont have big enough workloads of the right type to notice for now.

If a farmer buys a 1000HP tractor & discovers its only a 700 HP tractor, just because he hasnt done any 1000hp jobs yet, doesn't mean he wasn't short changed.

 

[venkat.sellappan]

It may be possible that cloud "service provides" are downplaying the impact as it would adversely impact their business, like Intel downplaying it.

I believe plain OS provider (redhat) is more closer to actual impact.

Measureable: 8-19% OLTP database workloads is no good news (very noticeable in my opinion; I am a database administrator)

https://access.redhat.com/articles/3307751

 

[richardstaller]

If you're rendering and doing video editing and have invested substantial money and effort to improve your system's performance any hit to performance is significant. Same is true of gamers. A class lawsuit is in order and I want the ability to say no to any performance hitting OS patches. I'll take my chances with the hackers using my firewall.

 

[Saurabh Harwande]

I don't know about others but my system(Linux) now seems slower and runs hotter after updating recently. I can hear the fans screaming when I have some performance intensive tasks running and sometimes it gets laggy for a brief moment. This is really sad, since I was gonna hold out another year before buying(or rather could buy) a new system. :-/ Guess I have to rollback to older linux version.

 

[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!