This also likely impacts the up and coming Comet Lake chips, this newly discovered vulnerability is like Meltdown in reverse, and mitigating it could mean some pretty bad performance hits (some instructions executing 2 to 19 times slower). Even worse, if I read a few articles right, this might be something made even worse by Intel’s new hardware security platform.
Those still sticking with Big Blue better hope the more severe slowdowns do not apply to productivity tasks like rendering, or otherwise it could mean rendering noisy images at tiny resolutions even on the newer chips.
So far, this has no known effect on AMD processors, a worst case 19x slowdown could mean those nice little Bryce renders with chrome spheres are state-of-the-art again for modern resolutions (as I wouldn’t count on the GPU to pick up the slack due to bottlenecking).
This only reinforces what i am always saying to all people: Keep your workstation OFF the internet.
There is only one attack vector left and that is physical access.
Well, I would also add … “keep it in perspective.” Most of these vulnerabilities are theoretical, not practical. You need the performance that these architectural features [only …] can deliver, and vulnerabilities are the price you pay for them.
The only saving grace for Intel users is that there might not be a high enough risk of falling victim to need the mitigation. Otherwise this is far more than losing a few frames in a game or losing a few seconds of rendertime, this is a situation where people would call on Intel to recall their processors and refund their users.
Imagine getting a powerful i9 9900K to power your gaming and CG work, and it becomes a Celeron!?
