Intel loses up to 35% performance with Specter v2 and AMD up to 54%

Earlier this past week, a new variant of the Specter vulnerability appeared. Early reports suggested that only Intel and Arm processors were affected, but it was only yesterday that it became known that AMD’s entire Ryzen family is also vulnerable. The previously released “LFENCE/JMP” method used to mitigate the flaw in Ryzen processors has been deemed ineffective. In case you forgot, Specter and Meltdown allow attackers to steal sensitive data from microprocessors by exploiting speculative execution.

With this, Intel can lose up to 35% performance in very specific cases, while AMD is losing up to 54% performance. This data pertains to a laptop CPU such as the Intel Core i7-1185G7, which showed a performance loss of 35.6% and 34.1% in OSBench and Flexible IO Tester. For its part, the Intel Core i9-12900K loses up to 26.7% performancethe average of the 25 benchmarks gives a loss of 7.6%.

With AMD testing Stress-NG were made on the top of the range desktop processor, the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, this test measures performance by stressing the CPU with bogus operations per second. The average after 11 benchmarks was a performance loss of 3.31%, since in several benchmarks it experienced a performance improvement. In that same benchmark, an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX can lose up to 22% performance.

The least affected processors were server processors AMD EPYC, which reported a loss of 8.9% network performance and 7.2% less storage performance. On the other hand, some workloads even benefited from the mitigation with performance improvements of up to 3.8%.

Source: Hardwaretimes