Intel publishes its analysis of performance loss due to meltdown and specter vulnerabilities

The last few days there has been a lot of talk about the possible performance impact of patches released to fix the Meltdown and Specter vulnerabilities, finally Intel has released the results of its own tests.

Intel Releases Performance Results for Meltdown and Specter Vulnerability Patches

Intel has published the results of its tests to analyze the loss of performance of the mitigation of Meltdown and Specter, previously the company had said that the impact is not considerable so we can finally know if they were telling the truth or not. Sixth, seventh and eighth generation processors have been included in the tests, presumably the previous ones are more affected by being less efficient in their way of interacting with the operating system kernel.

Best processors on the market (January 2018)

Intel has only based its tests on synthetic tests and has not used real applications, in any case it can be seen that the analyzed processors suffer a loss of performance that is between 0% and 12%.

These results show that the performance loss of the Meltdown and Specter vulnerabilities is real and can be considerable in some cases, since 12% is much more than the improvement that Intel processors have suffered in the generational jumps of the last few years. years, especially from the arrival of Sandy Bridge to the arrival of Skylake. This could be even more so for fifth generation and earlier processors. You can check the official document here.