Mds vulnerabilities can reduce mac performance by 40%

Apple has issued a warning that the total solution for MDS vulnerabilities may reduce performance by up to 40% in some cases on Mac computers. This would be affecting those 7th generation Intel processors, but those products with Intel Core processors from Eighth and ninth generation would have a solution to this problem at the hardware level and it would not be necessary to deactivate the Hyper-Threading function.

Apple advises disabling Hyper-Threading on those 7th generation or earlier Intel Core Mac processors

Apple has advised users to disable Intel's Hyper-Threading feature on company computers because of the recently exposed MDS vulnerabilities. Citing internal testing, Apple said that users can expect up to 40% performance loss on tasks that are in high demand for threads (multi-threading). The loss of performance can be understood in this case, since the processor would be working with half threads.

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The Hyper Threading of Intel Core processors is the feature most closely associated with the attack vector MDS and while it is disabled there would be no problem with these vulnerabilities at the cost of losing great performance on certain tasks.

Although Apple recommends disabling Hyper-Threading, it will be up to each user to assess whether it is worth losing so much performance to be more secure on their systems. Tests conducted by Apple in May 2019 showed up to a 40% reduction in performance with tests including multi-threaded workloads and public benchmarks. Performance tests were performed using specific Mac computers. Actual results may vary based on model, configuration, usage, and other factors.

Right now, for Mac users who care a lot about security on their computers, there are two options. Going to the eighth or ninth generation of Intel processors or disabling Hyper-Threading, however, this will not protect the computer from all speculative execution attacks, but most.

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