Bad news for owners of AMD processors. A security flaw was discovered in the chips, and in fixing it, AMD had to reduce the performance of all of its Zen processors.
AMD recently unveiled a vulnerability called “Inception”, which manipulates a processor by creating an instruction that prompts it to repeat a function. This flaw can potentially lead to data leaks, which poses a serious threat to organizations that handle confidential information. This vulnerability affects all Zen processors, that is, a large part of AMD chip users.
The company quickly took action to address the vulnerability, but the patches came with an unintended consequence: a significant drop in CPU performance, especially for some applications.
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AMD decreases the performance of its processors to improve their security
Phoronix, a well-known source for Linux and hardware testing, looked at the impact of the new microcode mitigations on performance. The results, especially for AMD’s EPYC 7763 processor, paint a rather worrying picture for many users.
Indeed, the benchmarks carried out by Phoronix reveal that the patch of the “Inception” flaw can cause a drop in performance of up to 54%. This substantial reduction in power can have a significant impact on applications that rely on data processing, and therefore many industries.
Obviously, the extent of the performance degradation varies depending on the application used. Common applications such as Blender and Mozilla Firefox are only minimally impacted, and some show no noticeable change. However, more resource-intensive tasks, such as those involving data-heavy processes like MariaDB, experienced a significant drop in performance, exceeding the 50% mark.
AMD is not the only one to face such problems, sinceIntel had also recently had to sacrifice more than 50% of the performance of certain chips to fill the “Downfall” loophole.
Fortunately, there is good news for gamers. Phoronix ran the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme test which found an insignificant drop in performance, which bodes well for gaming. Gamers should therefore not be impacted by this reduction in processor power. on demanding applications.
