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posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 20 2019, @04:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the TANSTAAFL dept.

Intel Loses 5X More Average Performance Than AMD From Mitigations: Report

Intel has published its own set of benchmark results for the mitigations to the latest round of vulnerabilities, but Phoronix, a publication that focuses on Linux-related news and reviews, has conducted its own testing and found a significant impact. Phoronix's recent testing of all mitigations in Linux found the fixes reduce Intel's performance by 16% (on average) with Hyper-Threading enabled, while AMD only suffers a 3% average loss. Phoronix derived these percentages from the geometric mean of test results from its entire test suite.

From a performance perspective, the overhead of the mitigations narrow the gap between Intel and AMD's processors. Intel's chips can suffer even more with Hyper-Threading (HT) disabled, a measure that some companies (such as Apple and Google) say is the only way to make Intel processors completely safe from the latest vulnerabilities. In some of Phoronix's testing, disabling HT reduced performance almost 50%. The difference was not that great in many cases, but the gap did widen in almost every test by at least a few points.

To be clear, this is not just testing with mitigations for MDS (also known as Fallout, Zombieload, and RIDL), but also patches for previous exploits like Spectre and Meltdown. Because of this, AMD also has lost some performance with mitigations enabled (because AMD is vulnerable to some Spectre variants), but only 3%.

Have you disabled hyperthreading?


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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday May 20 2019, @08:22PM (2 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Monday May 20 2019, @08:22PM (#845620)

    Are you sure putting DRAM on/near cores is going to increase its failure rate significantly? Did Intel's eDRAM have this problem?

    I'm not sure about anything. I'm saying being an early adopter is never a good deal unless you have specific loads significantly benefiting from it. And personally, as a consumer, I have none.

    I am still waiting for my i7-3930K to become obsolete...

    but AC is thinking of upgrading.

    All I'm reading is the usual wait-and-see if the next Elder Scrolls runs fast enough / if the computer stops booting. Which is fine and reasonable. But waiting just because some supposed breakthrough is right around the corner? Pointless.

    The DARPA paper shows...This is no 5% incremental bump

    Let me tell what's going to happen when stacked DRAM hits the CPU market: Intel will reduce production costs while increasing 5% performance and power while segmenting the good stuff to the high-end servers. And they'll get away with it just like nVidia got away with this for the simple reason that AMD knows if they're serious they'll wipe the floor with them simply by competing over price and letting some other parties license their x86 / GPU stuff so they'd avoid being declared a monopoly.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 20 2019, @08:42PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Monday May 20 2019, @08:42PM (#845633) Journal

    Let me tell what's going to happen when stacked DRAM hits the CPU market: Intel will reduce production costs while increasing 5% performance and power while segmenting the good stuff to the high-end servers. And they'll get away with it just like nVidia got away with this for the simple reason that AMD knows if they're serious they'll wipe the floor with them simply by competing over price and letting some other parties license their x86 / GPU stuff so they'd avoid being declared a monopoly.

    Intel has had years to get serious against AMD. Instead, AMD's market share is increasing in all segments, even before the general release of Zen 2:

    https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/30/amd-gained-market-share-for-6th-straight-quarter-ceo-says/ [venturebeat.com]
    https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/05/18/amds-data-center-dominance-could-send-the-stock-hi.aspx [fool.com]

    And we are still on Intel's 14nm++++++++++++++ node.

    To be clear, Intel's true competition is TSMC, and to a lesser degree, Samsung. Intel is starting to feel the pain of owning its own fabs and sucking at it. AMD's move to become fabless was mocked back in the day, but now they are profiting from it.

    Intel's "14nm" process is so mature and "10nm" yields are so bad that they probably can't respond effectively to AMD's Zen 2. And AMD has usually been the price/performance leader, even when they couldn't match Intel's performance at all. Now AMD has the opportunity to lead on both price and performance.

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    • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday May 20 2019, @09:11PM

      by RamiK (1813) on Monday May 20 2019, @09:11PM (#845641)

      Intel has had years to get serious against AMD.

      Again, they don't want to since they need AMD around to avoid being branded as a monopoly. If I had to guess, they'd be fine with AMD taking over 15% of the x86 market so long as it's in the segments bordering on ARM's encroachment.

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