Industry Testing Shows Recently Released Security Updates Not Impacting Performance in Real-World Deployments

As Intel and others across the industry partner to protect customers from the exploits (referred to as “Spectre” and “Meltdown”) reported Wednesday, extensive testing has been conducted to assess any impact to system performance from the recently released security updates. Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are among those reporting that they are seeing little to no performance impact.

Specific findings include:

• Apple: “Our testing with public benchmarks has shown that the changes in the December 2017 updates resulted in no measurable reduction in the performance of macOS and iOS as measured by the GeekBench 4 benchmark, or in common Web browsing benchmarks such as Speedometer, JetStream, and ARES-6.”

  Microsoft: “The majority of Azure customers should not see a noticeable performance impact with this update. We’ve worked to optimize the CPU and disk I/O path and are not seeing noticeable performance impact after the fix has been applied.”

  Amazon: “We have not observed meaningful performance impact for the overwhelming majority of EC2 workloads.”

  Google: “On most of our workloads, including our cloud infrastructure, we see negligible impact on performance.”

Intel continues to believe that the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.

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