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Good and bad news from Intel regarding the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities; firmware updates are being pushed through for the vast majority of CPUs issued by the company in the past five years, but patches are impacting data centre performance.<\/p>\n
According to an update published yesterday, impacts in performance have ranged from 0% to 2% on industry-standard measures, including integer and floating point throughput, and server-side Java – in other words, common workloads for enterprise and cloud customers. For a benchmark simulating different types of I\/O loads, however, testing to stress the CPU in a 100% write case saw an 18% decrease in throughput performance.<\/p>\n
Navin Shenoy, Intel EVP and general manager of the Data Center Group, stressed the importance of these being guidelines, with customer-specific workloads likely to differ.<\/p>\n
“As expected, our testing results to date show performance impact that ranges depending on specific workloads and configurations,” wrote Shenoy. “Generally speaking, the workloads that incorporate a larger number of user\/kernel privilege changes and spend a significant amount of time in privileged mode will be more adversely impacted.”<\/p>\n
Intel added that it was “working hard” with partners and customers in the more serious cases of performance degradation. The company recommends Retpoline, a project headed by Google, as a potential mitigation. Retpoline – a portmanteau of ‘return’ and ‘trampoline’ – aims to attack speculative execution by ‘bouncing’ endlessly, in the process allowing indirect branches to be isolated. The company also recommends options that can be found in a more detailed whitepaper<\/a>.<\/p>\n