14 DAY TRIAL // 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.
Working on reducing performance impact
Things are getting worse on servers working with large amounts of data, where the performance impact could go as high as 25%.
“Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) tests, which provide a set of tools and libraries for writing high performance, scalable, user-mode storage applications, were measured in multiple test configurations. Using SPDK iSCSI, we saw as much as a 25% impact while using only a single core. Using SPDK vHost, we saw no impact,” Shenoy continued.
The Intel official also added that the company is working with partners on reducing the performance impact of its patches, pointing out that Google’s solution could come in handy in this regard. The search company said recently that its Meltdown and Spectre updates have no performance impact on devices.
Microsoft, on the other hand, explained that security updates released to Windows devices to cause a slowdown, confirming it’s the most noticeable on older configurations powered by Windows 7.