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Meltdown Fixes Will Slow Intel Computers -- Here's All The Proof You Need

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Intel has been trying to calm nerves around patches for the Meltdown and Spectre bugs since researchers revealed not only that the chip-level flaws not only left almost every modern computer open to surveillance, but that the fix would cause a slowdown in performance on affected systems.

In an attempt to get some clarity on just what degradation businesses and individuals would experience, Forbes had independent tests carried out by security researcher Thomas Roth. The takeaway? Businesses running large-scale, heavy workloads on their servers could see a significant impact, but the average PC user shouldn't experience any noticeable slowdown, Roth said.

Roth put an updated Intel i7-6700 chip running Ubuntu 16.04 with Linux Kernel 4.14.11 through its paces. Most significantly, he found severe issues with system calls (the requests made by programs to the kernel, the heart of the operating system helping run all other software). They were four times slower after the patch, he told Forbes. Roth also looked at the possible impact on web servers, using the Apache benchmark, a test "more equivalent to real-world scenarios" than the one he used for system calls. He found a drop of between 4% and 7%. But testing the chip with workloads on MySQL, a type of database, he found no fall in performance.

"I believe the main impact will be on really large scale environments such as search engines, large web-sites and cloud-providers, where even a 5% increase of the base workload requires additional hardware. For small-to-medium installations and desktop usage I do not believe the performance to be an issue for most workloads," Roth said.

Intel and Microsoft admit performance hit

Intel and Microsoft have both now warned of scenarios where slowdown are likely. And, unlike Roth, even Microsoft admitted consumer PCs would suffer.

Terry Myerson, executive vice president for the Microsoft Windows and Devices Group, issued a stark warning Tuesday, noting that for Windows 10 PCs running on older chips, in particular in "2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU," some benchmarks had shown "more significant slowdowns" than modern computers, which would only see milliseconds shaved off processes. For older PCs, "we expect that some users will notice a decrease in system performance," Myerson added. And for Windows 7 and 8 users running those 2015 machines, most users are expected to take a hit.

Intel didn't respond to Forbes' requests for comment Friday when Roth's results came in. But on Tuesday, it also updated users on the potential performance impact of updates to protect customers from Meltdown and Spectre attacks. "Based on our most recent PC benchmarking, we continue to expect that the performance impact should not be significant for average computer users," Intel wrote. "This means the typical home and business PC user should not see significant slowdowns in common tasks such as reading email, writing a document or accessing digital photos. Based on our tests on SYSmark 2014 SE, a leading benchmark of PC performance, 8th Generation Core platforms with solid state storage will see a performance impact of 6% or less."

Some businesses have already felt the impact of both the process of patching systems themselves and the subsequent slowdown. Epic Games reported stability issues for its Fortnite title last week, noting that one of its hosts had suffered "significant impact" after it was patched to address the Meltdown vulnerability.

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