Posted on 01/13/2018 7:40:06 AM PST by markomalley
As a performance junkie, I’m less concerned about the security risks of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities—after all, there are no known exploits in use today—than I am about a performance hit from the fixes.
And from what I’m seeing, my concerns are warranted.
My sole experience with a fully updated platform so far is with Microsoft’s original Surface Book. It’s based on an Intel “Skylake” Core i7-6700U and has 16GB of LPDDR3 and a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drive. The Surface Book is running the 64-bit Windows 10 Pro Fall Creator’s Update.[ Further reading: How to remove malware from your Windows PC ]
I basically drove the machine all week at CES, and on Friday morning when I fired it up at home, I found that Microsoft had pushed out two pairs of firmware updates that address the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.
I’ll admit, I’m still trying to play catch up on just what the hell is going on with Spectre and Meltdown, but this was a great opportunity to run before and after benchmarks on a production machine.
I know from reading Steve Walton’s write-up at TechSpot that the performance of games and most CPU-intensive apps doesn’t change. But Walton found storage read/write performance to be an issue, so this was my first point of investigation on the Surface Book. I started my tests with a not-yet-patched machine.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
If you want a slower computer, you might as well get a Mac.
Or one that just works and won’t have you spending all day trying to find the “patch” to fix some obscure blue screen or why your Bluetooth isn’t connecting.
My iPhone5s doesn’t “just Work”.
It can’t be made to distinguish among various identical bluetooth speakers and it doesn’t automatically recognize a hot spot that it has been attached to multiple times per day while driving away from the house and through the ‘hood. The hotspot doen’t even appear in the list until the wifi has been turned off and on and the hotspot is the only available signal once out of the ‘hood and on the highway.
Very annoying.
It looks like its an interaction between disk encryption (usually a good idea) and the PCI-e control section within the microprocessor which is causing the delay.
Considering how much work put into getting PCI-e working on M.2 memory cards, this sucks.
Waiting for more info to come out
I can’t even begin to tell you the countless man days I have lost dealin with Windows issues... I have not spend even 1 man day on Problems since getting a Mac 7 years ago now. I still lose a few man weeks a year dealing with the Windows issues.
Never had to deal with anything but hardware failures with the dozens of unix variants I have run over the decades as well.
Your experience may be different but, I’ll take a Mac anyway over Windows.. too old to waste my time because some Asian company built a cheap piece of hardware with a flaky driver.
Linux Mint for the desktops. Windoz in VMs.
I’m just pointing out that Apple stuff doesn’t “just work”.
My wife experiences all sorts of trouble with her iPad. I don’t go there, she has to take it up with the “geniuses”.
That has always been the biggest joke when Apple smugly started calling it’s employess “geniuses”. They were basically liberal snowflakes before the term snowflakes becsme mainstream. And as far as them being geniuses, it’s pretty bad when you know more about the products than they do and you’re not a Apple fanatic.
My older toshiba laptop seems ok after the fix.
ditto
[[But Walton found storage read/write performance to be an issue,]]
So folks who do a lot of backups, or things like photography who need to store lots of photos and retrieve a lot too, are going to suffer performance loss
I just bought an M2 PCI-e NVMe Samsung 960 EVO specifically for it’s speed. It is super fast but I returned the laptop that it was in and need another laptop that will accept this type of drive. I would have kept the laptop but there were too many problems or things I didn’t care for. The power plug was too small and got bent in less than a month, and the cord was way too short. The home and end keys I use a lot especially on forums, and with this Acer Swift 3 (Intel 8th gen. i5-8250) you need to press the Fn key along with the home or end key which is a huge hassle. Now I bought it for $599 from Costco and finding a similarly priced laptop that will accept this Samsung 960 is an impossibility.
It was suggested somewhere that this patch will greatly slow down video editing. You don’t need no dang benchmark program to test that. And yet I have not seen a test done to date to show how much video editing is slowed down. If something took 20 minutes to render before then how long does it take now with the patch installed?
I got sidetracked in my previous post, but when I had the 960 running I had done the Crystal Disk test and the numbers were close to Samsungs specs... 3200 mb/s read and 1900 mb/s write but that was before this patch so it would be interesting to see how much that changed, but alas that laptop was returned and I have this new Samsung 960 unable to be used now.
You should probably just send that wayward device to me for testing. I have a couple of desktops that would probably just eat it up....
I run Linux Mint 18.2 on AMD quad core 8 meg hardware. I use the built in Radeon R7 graphics. Most processes do not appear to be impacted. HOWEVER, Civ V is no longer playable due to the slow response.
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