Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor box today we're taking a look at the impact addressing this spectra variant full-floor has on Intel's coffee-like CPUs now back when the meltdown and spectra vulnerabilities were first made public earlier this year we knew this was going to be an ongoing process the initial patches didn't address everything they addressed a variant one known as meltdown and then two spectra floors known as variant 2 and variant 3 recently though Intel and Microsoft roll that updates to address variant for a related speculative execution attack dubbed speculative store bypass speculative store bypass effects not just Intel but also AMD and ARM processors that said the AMD an ARM processors can be addressed much more easily via a simple software update so if you keep your operating system and web browser up-to-date you'll be protected against variant 4 automatically if you've got an Intel processor fully mitigating the issue requires not just these software updates but also a firmware update so in other words a BIOS update Intel started shipping microcode patches for variant forward to its hardware partners in beta form just a few months ago now and we're only just starting to see board partners pushing them out in fact to my knowledge a seuss is the only board partner to do so thus far however while the latest round of bias updates from a seuss does include the updated micro code for variant 4 it's not enabled in Windows by default for now it has to be manually enabled by adding a few registry keys it's likely at some point this will be done automatically and I suspect Microsoft is worried about a repeat of the disaster they encountered earlier in the UN addressing the first wave of unrealities so this summer and they've taken a more cautious approach Intel has said enabling the fix will lead to approximately a two to eight percent decrease in performance and this was observed when benchmarking with sis mark 2014 on client and server test systems but I'm sure what many of you want to know is what kind of performance impact this will have on your system particularly for games now for AMD users there should be no impact at all but I will look into this in another video soon for now we're going to see what kind of impact this has on those using a coffee CPU and please note for now we can't test older systems as the BIOS updates don't exist yet so for this test I'm using the cry 780 700 the non K version on the isuzu ROG Strix z 370 F gaming motherboard using bass version one zero zero two I'll be comparing results with SSB enabled and disabled and the enabled results will be labeled as pre update and the disabled as spectra v4 update so with that let's get to the results first up we have this Cinebench r15 results and here we see no changes at all with the variant for patch enabled the single thread score goes unchanged and the same is true for the multi threaded score as well three points isn't well within the margin of error here the CPU Z benchmark here we saw a 3% decrease for the single thread test but just a 1% decrease for the multi-threaded test and those results were repeatable over and over again the corona benchmark was run half a dozen times for each configuration and we found that the variant for mitigations impacted performance by just a single percent not a lot but we did consistently see a 1% reduction in performance here we see no change in performance when testing with 7-zip less than 1% difference between the two test configurations now moving on to some gaming and we find that little has changed when benchmarking with battlefield 1 the 1% low result was consistently lower with the variant 4 update enabled that said we're only talking about a 2% drop-off in performance far cry 5 only saw a one and a half percent drop off for the average framerate with a 1% change for the minimum and although the variant 4 update did make the core i7 8700 consistently slower by 1 to 2 FPS it's not exactly a big performance here we again only see a 1 to 2 FPS hit when testing with Rainbow six siege so not much else to say there and then finally I took a look at for at night and here we do see a slightly larger 3% drop off for the average frame rate as well as the frame time performance again not a big change but we were consistently seeing a 4 to 5 FPS drop in performance so Intel claimed a 2 to 8 percent performance it when addressing the variant for vulnerability by disabling speculative store by past but our tests it looks more like just one two three percent the impact for Linux users appears to be more in line with intel's own claim and we believe that comes down to the windows scheduler which is less efficient than the linux scheduler previously we found when patching variant one two and three this reduced the gaming performance of the core i7 eighty seven hundred k by up to five percent though for the most part we only saw a zero to three percent decrease in framerate very four has seen a further one to three percent dip in performance though this time we were testing with the non k 8700 but the margins should be much the same across the entire range what this all means is since december last year the game informative intel's coffee-like CPUs is down by one to six percent for the most part we're likely only talking one to two FPS in games pushing over 60 FPS and up to five FPS far higher refresh rate gaming again not a big deal overall but it's worth keeping in mind that intel will suffer an IPC hit because of this with future architectures that address these vulnerabilities at a hardware level for now though those of you who own an eighth generation intel core processor needn't worry about you came is turning into a slideshow the performance impact isn't that significant that said even if it was we would strongly recommend you update your bias and enable the mitigations as soon as possible because remember just like Daniel Ricciardo hackers like I'm vulnerable and in fact this is gonna do it for this one for now if you did enjoy the video be sure to hit the like button subscribe for more content if you appreciate the work we do your hammer box then consider supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'm your host Steve see you next time