Safe or smooth, but not both: Mitigation for the newly discovered Downfall bug in Intel processors plummets the performance of affected chips by 19 to 39 percent.
As expected, the mitigation of the newly revealed bugs in Intel processors has a major impact on performance. It came to light last week that Intel chips are vulnerable to an attack that exploits speculative execution to steal sensitive data such as passwords. The bug is a successor to Specter and is present in relatively recent chips, but not in twelfth or thirteenth generation units.
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When the bug was revealed, it became clear that mitigating it would negatively affect the performance of the chip. Phoronix in the test the patch now on Xeon Platinum 8380 chips (Ice Lake), a Xeon Gold 6223R (Cascade Lake), and an Intel Core i7-1165G7 (Tiger Lake). The different benchmarks experienced a different impact, but in many cases the chips lost more than thirty percent of their performance. In the case of the Core chip, the performance dip could even reach 39 percent.
That is not too bad, in the sense that Intel itself had predicted a negative impact of 50 percent. In practice, however, affected chips are clipped. Intel therefore allows customers to consider for themselves whether they want to patch the bug. After all, in this case, the side effects of the drug are potentially worse than the disease itself. The Downfall attack is not easy to pull off, but it does provide a vector for determined attackers.
2023-08-14 08:09:37
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