I built my current rig in 2013 and It’s been serving me well since. Only the PSU has died on me thus far. But It’s starting to show It’s age. I’ve been meaning to a full rig upgrade for the last few months.
One thing that’s kept me hesitant about upgrading (other than DRAM pricing ) is the recent near constant stream of CPU exploits published. Although they’ve mainly been affecting Intel some also affected AMD. And CPU performance has taken a hit with every patch released.
So Is It worth waiting another few CPU revisions to let them sort out this mess to avoid seeing my new shiny CPU get slapped with a 15% performance drop in the future due to a security patch?
I think I was pre-coffee and in a foul mood that morning
But, here it goes.
From my (limited) understanding, you’re not going to take a performance hit. You’re not going to slow down. Your CPU just won’t take advantage of certain features that sometimes offer a performance boost.
The risk for getting rekt by Spectre at the individual workstation is very low (in my opinion and in the opinions of SMEs). Is it an obnoxious, glaring oversight twenty years in the making? Yes. Are you a cloud provider? If so, you should ignore my “meh” attitude and look into remediation. Otherwise, I say go for it
I also understand that the operating system patches could circumvent this without risking performance boosts.
If you’re in the market for Intel for reasons that make people buy Intel, I don’t think you need to wait 10 years or however long it’s going to take to out-engineer spectre.
I’m not waiting for Spectre; I expect it to be several years before it’s completely mitigated in hardware.
I am waiting for Meltdown to be fixed before buying Intel, however.
Both Meltdown and Spectre are substantial performance hits for most stuff you do on a computer, certainly anything involving context switching or disk access. Meltdown was ~5%, Spectre ~8% (with retpoline) and L1Terminal ~3%. That’s around 15% all-told. They aren’t trivial, they are severe.
From a little Googling, I see several sources saying that there’s been a measurable loss of performance in real world applications caused by the patches. Anandtech has a great article on it.
I hold no alliegance to any one CPU maker, I’ll buy based on what fits my needs best, which currently looks to be the Ryzen 7 2700X. Though Ryzen 3 has me tempted to wait for It’s release.
The vulnerabilities themselves aren’t serious enough that I’d no longer consider an Intel build, but Intel’s handling of the situation (both disclosure and mitigation) has been so bad it’s affected my buying decisions.
My guess is zen2 will have additional hardware mitigations for Spectre, which will minimize the performance impact, but it won’t actually be fixed. Same with intel’s next-generation. Spectre is a real bugbear to entirely fix.
) is the recent near constant stream of CPU exploits published. Although they’ve mainly been affecting Intel some also affected AMD. And CPU performance has taken a hit with every patch released.
