Meltdown & Spectre: Analyzing Performance Impacts on Intel's NUC7i7BNH
by Ganesh T S on March 23, 2018 4:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Spectre
- Benchmarks
- Meltdown
Miscellaneous Benchmarks
CINEBENCH R15 is our benchmark of choice for 3D rendering. It provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. This benchmark is largely unaffected by the patching. All the recorded numbers are within the margin of expected errors from one run to another.
x264 v5.0 is another benchmark that is unaffected by the Meltdown and Spectre patches.
7-Zip is a very effective and efficient compression program, often beating out OpenCL accelerated commercial programs in benchmarks even while using just the CPU power. 7-Zip has a benchmarking program that provides tons of details regarding the underlying CPU's efficiency. In our benchmark suite, we are interested in the compression and decompression MIPS ratings when utilizing all the available threads. This benchmark also remains unaffected, with the results happening to be within the margin of error from run to run.
Agisoft PhotoScan is a commercial program that converts 2D images into 3D point maps, meshes and textures. The program designers sent us a command line version in order to evaluate the efficiency of various systems that go under our review scanner. The command line version has two benchmark modes, one using the CPU and the other using both the CPU and GPU (via OpenCL). We have been using an old version of the program with 50 photographs in our reviews till now. The updated benchmark (v1.3) now takes around 84 photographs and does four stages of computation:
- Stage 1: Align Photographs (capable of OpenCL acceleration)
- Stage 2: Build Point Cloud (capable of OpenCL acceleration)
- Stage 3: Build Mesh
- Stage 4: Build Textures
We record the time taken for each stage. Since various elements of the software are single threaded, others multithreaded, and some use GPUs, it is a very relevant benchmark from a media editing and content creation perspective.
Since this is a real-world benchmark, we can see performance impacts in some of the stages. While the first and last ones do not have any significant deviation, stages 2 and 3 are worse off by around 12.8% and 6.8% respectively in the non-GPU case.
The benchmarks section wraps up with the new Dolphin Emulator (v5) benchmark mode results. This is again a test of the CPU capabilities, but, we don't see much impact on the performance from the patching. The bennchmark consistently took around 325 seconds in all three patching configurations.
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akula2 - Sunday, March 25, 2018 - link
Really, are you stupid or what?Don't you know what is happening, Snowden and Wikileaks? You've the audacity to call me as a conspiracy theorist, you moron where were you when Dual_EC_DRBG "vulnerability" was discovered? Who planned that backdoor? Don't you know the collusion of companies behind the epic data collection programme launched by the NSA? Do you really think people on this planet are idiots?
boeush - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Yes, Asia - that global bastion of freedom, democracy, open-source transparency, and total absence of corruption. From China, to Vietnam, to North and South Korea, to India and Pakistan, to Myanmar and Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iran, the Philippines, Japan, oh my... LMAOMatthmaroo - Saturday, March 24, 2018 - link
Someone forgot some meds todayTrevorH - Saturday, March 24, 2018 - link
I would love to see some linux testing added to this set up. I work for a VoIP provider and run CentOS on a bunch of servers and the results I see by adding the initial RH patches were an approximate 30% increase in cpu time. Adding the microcode patch and enabling the IBRS mitigation to that resulted in a 100% increase in cpu usage for our workload. Yes, 100% increase - so a machine with 20 cores that was running at 800% cpu usage before the patches was using 1600% (16 cores at 100% each) after both the PTI and IBRS mitigations were turned on. Now our workload is probably quite unusual in that it uses both KVM virtualization and does lots and lots of small packet UDP network i/o but it does mean that with the mitigations in place, in order to run the same workload that we did before, we'd need to buy just about double the hardware we currently have in use.timecop1818 - Sunday, March 25, 2018 - link
Hey but why the fuck did you even install the patches, or enable these "fixes"? You've just said it, you are running a closed voip routing system. Why do you need to care about either of these non-problems in those servers? Why do people running Windows on desktop in single user setup need to care about any of this? In an earlier comment Ryan mentioned there's registry settings to disable this, guess what I'm doing as soon as I'm home?Alexvrb - Saturday, March 24, 2018 - link
You need to test with older architectures. Pre-Broadwellkn0w1 - Sunday, March 25, 2018 - link
Here is one limited comparison for Ivy Bridge and Y-Series Broadwell for good measure.https://www.smajumdar.com/2018/03/musing-48-impact...
HStewart - Saturday, March 24, 2018 - link
Well first all - i not sure if the average customer will even notice these changes.Here is two things I thinking of
1. Has there been actual virus / attack with this stuff - or all of this hypothetical
2. It odd that power consumptions actually improved with the path
The good news this stuff is final over with - move on.
satai - Sunday, March 25, 2018 - link
"The good news this stuff is final over with."Probably not. We can expect more types of Spectre and similar attacks to come...
29a - Saturday, March 24, 2018 - link
I have to give props to ASRock for releasing a new BIOS for my Z170 Extreme3 motherboard dated 2018/3/12, I wasn't sure if they would update a budget Z170 board. This along with every ASRock MB I have owned being super stable has made me a very loyal customer.