Windows update will reduce Spectre and Meltdown patch performance hit to 1-2%

[Speed Weed]

Sources: 

1) https://www.techspot.com/news/77026-windows-update-reduce-spectre-meltdown-patch-performance-hit.html

 

2) https://www.extremetech.com/computing/279245-new-google-patch-reduces-spectre-performance-impact-to-noise

 

Quote from the 1st source and picture from the 2nd source.

Quote

Why it matters: Spectre and Meltdown were seriously dangerous security flaws and companies rushed to secure their devices. Because most of the protections were quick patches rather than well-thought-out security systems, performance suffered as a result.

Gaming performance on Intel processors dropped by 3-4% on average, 5% at most. But SSD storage suffered the most, where people were complaining of up to 30% decreases in speed. Fortunately, by enabling the Retpoline mitigation strategy with the Windows 10 19H1 update coming early next year, performance will be uplifted to only ~1-2% below to where it was originally.

Alex Ionescu noticed that his Surface Pro 4 running the Windows 19H1 beta had much faster storage speeds, and asked a Windows Kernel developer if they'd managed to lessen the performance impact of the patch.

Good thing Microsoft is working on a new Spectre and Meltdown update to minimize the performance impact of Intel-based system. As far as I can tell, my computer performance impact is not very noticeable at all after installing Spectre and Meltdown fix from Microsoft and motherboard manufacturer a long time ago. Let's hope this update will going to boost Intel-based system performance more especially to the I/O performance.   

[bellabichon]

Very good to know that Microsoft, Intel, and even AMD are stepping up their game in this department. I haven't noticed any performance difference from before the Spectre and Meltdown update, to after, but it's still good to know that work is being done. 

[lewdicrous]

13 minutes ago, bellabichon said:

I haven't noticed any performance difference from before the Spectre and Meltdown update, to after, but it's still good to know that work is being done. 

The drop in performance wasn't gonna affect the average user as much as people thought (Not to a noticeable amount anyways)

Spoiler

 

 

[LAwLz]

44 minutes ago, lewdicrous said:

The drop in performance wasn't gonna affect the average user as much as people thought (Not to a noticeable amount anyways) 

Who would have thought that tech journalists, whose entire living depends on getting clicks, would exaggerate a story in order to get more clicks.

 

 

Anyway, I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't use retpoline until now (or rather, Q1 2019). It's been the default mitigation in Linux for months now.

Worth noting that it does not protect from all Spectre attacks. From what I know it only protects from variant 2, and if that's correct then it won't help with the Meltdown (variant 3) performance hit (worth noting that the performance hit of the meltdown fix has been widely exaggerated too).

[The Owl]

I think the title should be changed to:

"Windows update will reduce Spectre/Meltdown patch performance hit and the files you own by 1-2%"

[Fasterthannothing]

So if I understand this correctly the file deletion bug from windows wasn't a bug it was just them testing how to get a 30% storage speed increase for the meltdown patch because who cares about storage speed if you don't have anything to store /s