Intel Finally Details Slowdowns Caused by Meltdown & Spectre Updates

[Bot]

Intel has already confirmed earlier this month that its Meltdown and Spectre updates are likely to have a performance impact on computers that install it, and in a new press release on Wednesday, the company reveals more information collected following a series of tests.

Basically, Intel says that the slowdown experienced by systems depends on workloads and configurations, a thing that the company reiterated on several occasions.

In other words, older computers running high-demanding tasks are the most likely to be affected by a noticeable slowdown, while the newest chips on Windows 10 shouldn’t experience anything else than a minor performance impact which most users wouldn’t even detect.

Intel says it ran a series of tests on server platforms and it discovered that the impact could reach 2% in the case of common workloads typically performed by enterprise and cloud customers. The slowdown could reach 4% according to an “online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark simulating modeling a brokerage firm’s customer-broker-stock exchange interaction,” Navin Shenoy, general manager of the data center group, explained.

Read more: Intel Finally Details Slowdowns Caused by Meltdown & Spectre Updates

 

[plat1098]

With Spectre and Meltdown--if it was known to deliberately place them, it was known how to use (exploit) them. But, any hardware slowdown in this context is so not trivial. The amount of currency at stake at any given moment--unreal. One could say: nobody's exploited anything (yet) and the world doesn't stop en masse to accommodate a patch or two. So, it's "business as usual."