New software patches to mitigate Spectre-related vulnerabilities continue to be discovered on Intel processors. This raises questions about the potential performance impact of these mitigations. Unboxed Hardware has tested its Core i7 8700K to see if there is any loss of performance after installing the latest patch against Spectre 4.
Core i7 8700K Confirmed to Deliver No Performance Loss with Latest Spectre 4 Patch
Hardware Unboxed tested the performance of its Core i7 8700K processor against Spectre 4, both BIOS and Windows 10, with and without the installation of patches. In general, the impact on performance is almost zero, with only a couple of FPS lost in games that move loosely above 100 FPS, and few points in the processor performance tests.
The clear conclusion is that there is no reason not to install the mitigation patches with the loss of performance in mind, as this is totally negligible and we will not notice anything in the daily use of the PC. The Core i7 8700K has great potential, so these patches hardly affect it, what’s not so clear is that the same thing will happen in humbler processors like the Pentium and models of several generations ago.
There are rumors that Intel will launch the new Core 9000 in August, which will include mitigations against Spectre at the silicon level, although it is probably only for the first variants, so we will have to continue installing security patches. We’ll have to wait and see what these new Intel processors actually bring back.
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