Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware unboxed you've probably seen our coverage over the past few weeks on the meltdown and specter vulnerabilities specifically the performance drops you can expect from the patches that address these issues Steve's been doing a great job covering the desktop side of things where we currently have a serious lack of updates for anything outside the newest hardware platforms today however I'll be diving into the mobile side of things to see how meltdown inspector patches have affected ultra portable laptops at this stage om is are much more keen on patching laptops than they are on patching desktop motherboards especially the big-name manufacturers like HP Dell and others this makes it easier to test older hardware platforms at least with the hardware I have on hand so in this video I'll be looking at the impact on both the latest 8th gen Intel you serious parts along with three-year-old 5th gen Broadwell parts the laptops I'm using for testing are both Dell XPS 13 so high-end ultra portable systems with 15 watt CPUs inside the new 190 360 model has an Intel Core i7 8550 you inside with 8 gig of ram and a 256 gig samsung PM 961 a PCIe SSD the older Broadwell 93 43 model comes with a core i5 5200 you also a gig of ram and a 256 gig samsung PM 851 SATA SSD as with desktops patching these laptops requires two separate updates a BIOS update specific to the device that tackles the spectra vulnerabilities along with a recent Windows Update that kills meltdown and supports the spectre BIOS patch I've tested both Dell XPS 13 in two configurations before either update was applied and after both updates were applied this will give us a good idea of how to performance differs between an unpatched system and a fully protected system I should note here that the performance differences you'll see may not apply to all laptops with this sort of hardware inside but it should give a good indication of these patches effect a more performance constraint system let's kick things off here by looking at PC mark which is a set of workloads designed to simulate real-world tasks across the three PC mark 8 tests and PC mark 10 there isn't a significant impact in the meltdown inspector patches with performance declining by just a few percent in most cases this is margin of error type stuff and for most cases won't be a noticeable difference in performance Cinebench r15 is an interesting one here as we do start to see some performance degradation the 8th gen platforms seem to be more heavily affected here dropping by 7% in the multi-threaded workload and 3% in the single thread workload Broadwell was still affected but the difference was negligible in the single area test and just 4% in multi-threaded Cinebench isn't the only rendering test that's been affected while rendering x264 videos in a two pass encode pass one performance dropped on both kb lake refresh and Broadwell to the tune of 8 and 4 percent respectively the more intensive pass to where most of the actual encoding occurs isn't significantly slowed on the I 78550 you but it does suffer a marginal decrease on the i5 5200 you interestingly rendering an x265 video in handbrake with a single pass actually improves the performance marginally after the update particularly on Broadwell where the render time is cut by 5% so it's not necessarily every rendering workload that is affected by the patches the final video rendering test I have is premier which is affected by the specter and meltdown patches on the I 78550 you both the luma tree effect enhanced test and the non luma tree test declined by around 5% although the performance decline is slightly higher on the i-5 5,200 you on a performance constrained device like an ultraportable seeing any performance slowdowns in Premiere it's a big deal as most of these laptops run a fine line between being capable of editing videos and delivering a choppy mess Photoshop suffers from the patches as well though it does depend on the filter you're using one of the most intensive in the application is the iris blur which takes 11% longer on intel's hñ cpus and 19% longer on fifth gen after the patches are applied this is a bit of a worst-case scenario as a number of the less intensive field to see a negligible difference but this is a reminder that only some workloads are hit by the patches even within an application for benchmarking enthusiasts like us it's disappointing to see one of our favorite tools Microsoft Excel suffer from a performance hit due to the security patches on both the KB Lake refresh and Broadwell ultraportable platforms the Montecarlo workload takes a four to six percent performance hit which is in line with most other drops would have seen compression and decompression is a very interesting workload to test before and after the patches in 7-zip performance is mostly unchanged with the only real decline seen in compression on the i5 5200 you to the tune of 4% however in winrar compression things get a bit crazy with the i7 8550 years showing performance improvements while the i5 5200 you gets it with a 6 percent performance drop it's strange but I double and triple-check this result and you guess it came up the same every time MATLAB is another workload where Broadwell is affected more than KB Lake refresh on the i5 5200 you simulation performance drop by a rather significant 15% while on the i-5 8550 you the impact was less severe at just 5% while neither of the dell XPS 13 czar benchmarked are very good gaming machines I thought it'd also be interesting to look at 3d mark this test mostly hits the integrated GPU rather than the CPU so it's not a massive surprise to see no real performance impact here the final set of tests I'll be looking at our storage benchmarks because it's here we saw the biggest impact on the desktop platforms it's a similar story on both a PCIe and SATA SSD equipped laptops here with massive reductions in performance seen in nearly every situation the 8th gen XPS 13 with a PCIe nvme SSD suffers significantly in a sequential write test with the performance decrease of 24% whereas the fifth gen XPS 13 with a SATA SSD is largely unaffected with q21 thread ran the performance though the 8th gen system takes a 5 and 15 percent hit in reads and writes respectively where's the fifth gen system gets punished with 18 and 39 percent drops it's interesting to see how other cue depths and thread counts affect performance with 8 thread 8 queue depth random transfers the 8th gen system takes a 14% hit in both reads and writes while the Broadwell machine takes a larger 34% hit in reads by the same 14% hit in writes and then switching to a single thread round transfer with the queue depth of 32 and the Saito drive gets punished with more than a 40% reduction in performance in both reads and writes compared to 35 and 12% drops in reads and writes respectively on the PCIe drive in the end the performance impact of meltdown and Specter patches is a bit more severe on laptops with an Intel u series CPU inside compared to the desktop platform Steve looked at earlier on the desktop most productivity workloads saw performance drops that were inside the margin of error or in other words you know only a few percent at best however on both kb lake refresh and broadway laptops i looked at here almost every workload was impacted by an amount that's too large to attribute to the margin of error workloads like Cinebench x264 encoding Excel Premiere Photoshop and MATLAB all experience noticeable performance declines typically around the 5% mark though the worst case was a 19 percent drop in Photoshop on the i5 5200 you other tests like PC mark handbrake 3d mark and both compression and decompression though were largely unaffected one of the more interesting things to note from these benchmarks is there doesn't seem to be a significant difference in the amount of slowdown between the three year-old Broadwell laptop and the modern cable a refreshed laptop in productivity workloads it's certainly not a situation where the older and slower Broadwell is affected more than your parts in fact in some situations the 8th gen parts are hit harder while in others 5th gen suffers more we'll continue to monitor the situation with the meltdown and two patches especially as it sounds like a number of updates have been causing random crashes and other instability problems on older hardware in fact just today Intel has advised OMS to pull their Spectre BIOS updates due to these problems and there have been some reports the updates don't even fix the vulnerabilities I personally didn't see any crashes testing the laptops I looked at for this video but you know no doubt we'll be seeing even more updates to try and lock down these issues in the coming weeks and months and of course we'll let you know if any of them further affect its system performance as always if you've appreciated our testing of meltdown inspector over the last few weeks feel free to support us directly through our patreon at patreon.com slash Hardware unboxed otherwise I'll see you in the next video you