Since the vulnerabilities of Spectre
and Meltdown appeared, specialists in information
security services anticipated that implementing software fixes for
these flaws implied a decrease in the performance of a system, although due to
the new information related to this type of cyber errors the exact impact is
still unknown, and there is still not enough information to test whether the
impact is the same on both Intel and AMD computers.
To find answers to this question, a group of information security services specialists have performed several tests on Intel developments.
In total, the specialists analyzed five
different Intel chips, concluding that, in general, enabling all security
patches reduces performance by an average of 15% on all CPUS with the Hyper
Threading function enabled, while the disabling of this technology increases
the impact of CPU performance to 20% on average.
On the other hand, AMD CPUS have an impact of
around 3% with all the protections enabled; Note that it is not necessary to
disable the Hyper Threading function on AMD chips.
So far, there are no known cases in the wild in
which the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities have impacted some development
of AMD in addition to Epyc; however, the company has made no mention of a
hypothetical invulnerability against these failures, because, according to
specialists in information security services, there is no guarantee that products
released in the future by this company do not require corrections that impact
their performance significantly.
However, according to the specialists from the
International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS), if these problems keep
affecting to greater extent Intel developments it will increase the
controversial performance comparison between this company and AMD.
Because the risk of these vulnerabilities
exists only at the theoretical level by now, it is not clear how cautious Intel
development operators are, what’s known so far is that the complete
implementation of corrections significantly reduces the CPU performance,
especially in the company’s latest products.
