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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rocky12345 - Sunday, March 25, 2018 - link
What I would like to see is for tests done on older cpu's like ivy's and sandy bridge since that is where Intel said the biggest hits in performance would be.Ryan Smith - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
It's on the list. The microcode is shipping, but we can't actually cover it until either an updated BIOS lands for one of the old mobos we still have, or MS publishes the microcode through Windows Update.CircuitBoard - Sunday, March 25, 2018 - link
Well, looks like storage trend that going to NVMe would be slower than i've expected...piasabird - Sunday, March 25, 2018 - link
It should be illegal for Intel to continue to sell defective parts.HStewart - Sunday, March 25, 2018 - link
Some one purposely creating software virus that effects the security of a system does not mean the system is defected - the real problem here is people that create the virus. That does not mean the system should be updated to prevent such attacks on system in the future.Keep in mind these issues are just on Intel - also on ARM and AMD. And stating that it is illegal for Intel and not including others should complete bias against Intel
mkaibear - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
It should also be illegal for Ford to sell cars which can go faster than the speed limit. And it should be illegal for Marshall to sell guitar amps which can go loud enough to damage hearing. And it should be illegal for Cisco to sell border routers which can pass traffic to Tor.... Or alternatively we can accept that the problem is people using what is sold for an illegal purpose, like rational humans...
FourEyedGeek - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
They are not defective, a flaw / exploit has been discovered but they work as intended.Duncan Macdonald - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Can you do a similar test on an AMD Ryzen system. I would be interested to see the results there (especially whether Microsoft enables the performance sapping Meltdown fixes on a CPU that does not need them).casperes1996 - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Nice read as always. I'd like to suggest a follow-up, looking at how the performance impact is on Linux/macOS, to see if other Ones are hit in the same way as WindowsAdam Slivinsky - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Seeing as you are using Steve Gibson's InSpectre tool https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm in the screen shots, it might be nice mention it and link to it instead of just showing it in the images that spiders can not read.