Among other things, Spelman reveals that Intel expects that the hardware-based fixes for the CPU vulnerabilities should put performance back on track. As you may remember, the software mitigation reduced performance by 3 to 10 percent, depending on the workload and system. The hardware-based mitigation will be rolled out with Cascade Lake later this year.
IC: When the software mitigations came through, there was talk about a performance deficit, roughly of 3-10% on the latest platforms depending on the workload and system. Do the hardware changes put performance back on track – were you able to implement the changes without the same performance deficit caused by the software mitigations?
LS: Our expectation is that the hardware fixes put the performance back on track. We will be measuring this as we get through final testing of the silicon but at the same time we are also getting silicon enhancements, so the comparison is sort of apples to oranges – either way performance is set to be increased. To be honest, I don’t know if the logic about if the mitigations still causes a performance deficit is relevant, given that the overall platform performance with each new generation with the new features is set to be higher than the pre-patched systems regardless. We are always moving forward to increase performance per core. We always design the core with security in place – I’m not saying that those security measures will always have zero performance impact, but what I would say is that Intel is both a performance and security driven company and so we will continue working on those. But the expectation is, and this is not unique to security, is that moving something from software to hardware generally you accelerate performance.