03-01-2018, 04:04 AM
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/26...wn-patches
Quote:There’s a lot we still don’t know about the impact of these security patches on older PCs, but Tech Report recently put a Dell Alienware R13 with an Intel Kaby Lake Core i7-7700HQ through its paces, after making sure the only change to the system would be the application of a Spectre-specific patch after the system was otherwise completely updated. You’ll want to hit TR for the full report, but we’ll cover the highlights.
The average performance decline is in-line with the single-digit prediction, though there are exceptions, with some browser tests showing a ~10 percent drop. The largest drop is in PCMark 10’s app load times, which declined by 13.5 percent after a Spectre patch was applied. We’ve talked before about Meltdown possibly hitting I/O tests hard, but this is the first indication Spectre might whack them again.
Other applications saw smaller declines (spreadsheet handling, oddly enough, got faster with the patch) or didn’t change at all. As we expected, the performance shifts depend entirely on which applications you’re using and what workloads you run. We’ve yet to see any evidence game performance is impacted, for example, which is good news if you mostly use your PC for gaming. But that same variety in application usage models is going to make it harder to give an “average” report on what kind of performance hit consumers should expect. If the Spectre patch hits I/O workloads hard as a general rule (and this is strictly a hypothetical statement at this point in time) then two people who use the same content creation program for two different types of work might see two different performance impacts. It’s going to take time to map out these variations and longer still to cleanly map any variance in performance between AMD and Intel chips.