Intel Says Chip-Security Fixes Leave PCs No More Than 10% Slower (axios.com)

Intel trying to defuse concern that fixes to widespread chip security vulnerabilities will slow computers, released test results late Wednesday showing that personal computers won't be affected much and promised more information on servers. From a report: The chipmaker published a table of data showing that older processors handled typical tasks 10 percent slower at most, after being updated with security patches. The information covered three generations of processors, going back to 2015, running Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 7 computer operating systems. Further reporting: Intel, Microsoft offer differing views on impact of chip flaw

Comments

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

They were told about it over 20 years ago, by the very people who were most likely to exploit it before it became public knowledge...

On 8 May 1995, a paper called "The Intel 80x86 Processor Architecture: Pitfalls for Secure Systems" published at the 1995 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy warned against covert timing channel in CPU cache and translation lookaside buffer (TLB).[23] This analysis was performed under the auspices of the National Security Agency's Trusted Evaluation Program (TPEP).

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[HiThere]

Both chips did branch prediction, AMD just checked address validity before the speculative execution rather than afterwards. This allowed Intel chips to be faster at executing the code by ignoring certain (apparently known) security problems.

But whether it was actually faster or not can be disputed, because Intel is also known to have gamed compilers to disadvantage AMD. In that case they made the AMD chips seem slower by cheating. The question is how many of the benchmarks were done with the altered compilers. And this is where the accusation that Intel made their chips *seem* faster gains validity.