The performance of the core i7 8700k is not affected by the specter 4 patch

As new Specter-related vulnerabilities continue to be discovered on Intel processors, new software patches are released to mitigate them. This raises questions about the possible impact on performance of these mitigations. Hardware Unboxed has tested its Core i7 8700K to analyze if there is any performance loss after installing the latest patch against Specter 4.

Core i7 8700K confirmed to lose no performance with latest Specter 4 patch

Hardware Unboxed has compared the performance of its Core i7 8700K processor with and without the installation of the patches against Specter 4, both at the BIOS and Windows 10 level. In general it can be said that the impact on performance is almost nil, being lost just a couple of FPS in games that loosely move above 100 FPS, and few points in processor performance tests.

We recommend reading our post on Discovered two new variants of the Specter vulnerability

The clear conclusion is that there is no reason not to install the mitigating patches with the loss of performance in mind, as this is totally negligible and we will not notice anything in the daily use of the PC. The Core i7 8700K has great potential, so these patches hardly affect it, what is not so clear is that the same thing happens in more humble processors such as Pentiums and models of several generations ago.

Rumors suggest that Intel will launch the new Core 9000 in August, which will include mitigations against Specter at the silicon level, although it will surely only be for the first variants, so it will be necessary to continue installing security patches. We will have to wait to see what these new Intel processors really bring back.