14 DAY TRIAL // One of the main concerns for users who installed Meltdown and Spectre patches on Intel systems was that computers could get substantially slower, and recent Microsoft benchmarks confirmed that the older the hardware gets, the bigger the performance impact of these updates.
In a press release today, Intel also confirmed that a slowdown is indeed one of the effects of the Meltdown and Spectre updates, but the company tried to play down the performance impact by emphasizing that it “should not be significant for average computer users.”
This is something that Intel has been saying from the very beginning after announcing patches for the hardware flaws, but until today, no figures were available to support the statement.
Intel claims that 8th generation platforms, namely Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake, with an SSD experience a “small” performance impact which could reach 6 percent when office productivity and media creation software is launched. The company, however, admits that on high-performance machineS with demanding processes like complex JavaScript operations, the slowdown could reach 10 percent.
Impact on the 7th generation Kaby Lake-H series is similar, Intel says, and stays at approximately 7 percent.
Older hardware, bigger impact
And last but not least, the 6th generation Skylake-S platform suffers from what Intel calls a slightly higher performance impact of approximately 8 percent. The same thing for Windows 7, with a “common” configuration suffering a 6 percent slowdown, with “impact even lower on systems with HDDs,” as Intel explains.
The company hasn’t missed the occasion to emphasize its focus on customer security, promising to deliver further updates in the coming weeks and months to minimize the performance impact of the original Meltdown and Spectre patches.
“For those Intel customers who are worried about performance impacts, you should know that we will work on creative solutions with our industry partners to reduce those performance impacts wherever possible,” Intel says.
The full results of Intel’s own benchmarks and the performance impact of Meltdown and Spectre patches on various CPU generations can be found in the photo included in the article.