Zombieload?

[FYZX7]

So I finished my part list for my next pc build and a friend notified me about that whole mds Zombieload thing, I wanted to go with an i7 9700k and now I'm hesitating.

I heard the fixes will take a good amount of performance away (up to 30-50% said one article), I'm lost at this point. Opinions?

[Princess Luna]

You're fine, not only Coffee Lake 8th/9th already has most hardware level fixes in place already the main target of the exploit lies on Hyper-Threading in which your i7 9700K doesn't even have on the first place.

[rio2]

All modern CPUs suck in terms of security (yes that includes AMD and I'm typing this on a 2400G). Zombieload "fix" only takes away 30% in some workloads if you disable HT, but most OSs by now have other mitigations. Choose your CPU based on perf/$ for your application (I assume it's gaming for you) not vulnerabilities.

[rio2]

Just now, Princess Luna said:

You're fine, not only Coffee Lake 8th/9th already has most hardware level fixes in place already the main target of the exploit lies on Hyper-Threading in which your i7 9700K doesn't even have on the first place. 

Yes he is fine. But to be clear 8th gen has no hardware fixes for anything, and 9th gen only for Meltdown. Spectre, Zombieload, Foreshadow, etc. only have software mitigations on every current CPU.

[Princess Luna]

3 minutes ago, rio2 said:

But to be clear 8th gen has no hardware fixes for anything

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/16/intel-spectre-meltdown-cpu-fix-coffee-lake/

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/coffee_lake

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/new-speculative-execution-bug-leaks-data-from-intel-chips-internal-buffers/

 

By Intels own words: "Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) is already addressed at the hardware level in many of our recent 8th and 9th Generation Intel® Core™"

[asand1]

Is it just me, or does Zombieload sound like horrorporn?

[rio2]

1 minute ago, Princess Luna said:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/16/intel-spectre-meltdown-cpu-fix-coffee-lake/

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/coffee_lake

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/new-speculative-execution-bug-leaks-data-from-intel-chips-internal-buffers/

 

By Intels own words: "Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) is already addressed at the hardware level in many of our recent 8th and 9th Generation Intel® Core™"

Ok I was wrong on that new steppings of 8th gen also include hardware fixes for L1TF, Meltdown and ZombieLoad. But that does not apply to Spectre, which still needs software/microcode mitigations currently on all CPUs.

[FYZX7]

20 minutes ago, rio2 said:

Zombieload "fix" only takes away 30% in some workloads if you disable HT

The i7 9700k doesn't come with HT so would that impact me hard in games? Not gonna act like I have any clue bout topics like that.

[rio2]

Just now, FYZX7 said:

The i7 9700k doesn't come with HT so would that impact me hard in games? Not gonna act like I have any clue bout topics like that. 

9th gen is not affected by ZombieLoad, you will be just fine.

[thechinchinsong]

You'll be fine. The i7-9700k has no hyperthreading which reduces much of the risk and potential performance degradation. Furthermore, the newest generations of Intel processors at least have mitigation built in for L1TF, Meltdown and ZombieLoad. The remaining potential security risks are up to you to evaluate but whatever software or mitigations that are due to come up shouldn't affect gaming performance much at all.