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Intel's Processors Lose More Performance From Vulnerability Mitigations Than AMD's

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

takyon writes:

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: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 20 2019, @06:17AM (3 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 20 2019, @06:17AM (#845436) Journal

    It couldn't happen to a better bunch of people. These vulnerabilities have nothing to do with me abandoning Intel years ago - but they go a long way toward justifying my decision.

    I wonder - - - if Intel concerned itself with actually improving their chips, and stopped trying to "manage" the chips they sold, where might they be today?

    An article from 1999, demonstrating that Intel's priorities were in the wrong place, even then - https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/1999/01/intels_processor_id.html [schneier.com]

    Intel's Processor ID
    Bruce Schneier
    ZDNet News
    January 26, 1999
    Last month Intel Corp. announced that its new processor chips would come equipped with ID numbers, a unique serial number burned into the chip during manufacture. Intel said that this ID number will help facilitate e-commerce, prevent fraud and promote digital content protection.

    Unfortunately, it doesn't do any of these things.

    To see the problem, consider this analogy: Imagine that every person was issued a unique identification number on a national ID card. A person would have to show this card in order to engage in commerce, get medical care, whatever. Such a system works, provided that the merchant, doctor, or whoever can examine the card and verify that it hasn't been forged. Now imagine that the merchants were not allowed to examine the card. They had to ask the person for his ID number, and then accept whatever number the person responded with. This system is only secure if you trust what the person says.

    The same problem exists with the Intel scheme.

    Note that Schneier skips right over the evil of national identity cards . . .

    Starting Score:    1  point
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       Interesting=2, Total=2
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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @09:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @09:53AM (#845463)

    Note that Schneier skips right over the evil of national identity cards . . .

    Without national identity cards, you'll get more spies intruded freely in your nation.

  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday May 20 2019, @05:49PM (1 child)

    by RS3 (6367) on Monday May 20 2019, @05:49PM (#845570)

    To me it's an all-to-common case of corporate greed. It's fairly well-known that you'll make more profit by spending $ on advertising rather than product improvement. Freaking Intel runs major television ads and sponsors major high-society sports and events. Great, but your chips are crap!

    For sure CPUs are better and faster, but I'd rather see the $ invested in testing and QC. There are people who are very good at finding design flaws, weaknesses, etc. Corporate management is always under pressure to maximize profits, and fixing a problem is never ever looked at as being a positive. "You're moving backwards!" or "Do you want to eat?" are some of the responses I've heard and even gotten.

    I don't think I've ever bought an Intel chip outright. I've bought (used, cheap) computers with Intel chips, but never new. I remember buying an NEC V30 speedup replacement for 8086, and when I built my first 386, I bought the AMD 40 MHz chip, and some Cyrix CPUs when they existed, but never Intel. I always wished TI would have gotten into CPU market. Their DSP chips were always considered awesome.