Intel Publishes Internal Test Data on Meltdown Patches

By Steve Burke Published January 16, 2018 at 11:53 pm

Industry

Intel has released its own internal testing of architectures dated from Skylake to Coffee Lake, using Windows 10 and Windows 7, in A/B testing between the Meltdown kernel patch. We’ve done some of our own testing (but need to do more), but not with the applications Intel has tested. As usual, exercise grain-of-salt-mining for first-party numbers, but it’s a starting point.

Intel claims that it’s found its CPUs largely retain 95-100% of their original performance (from pre-patch, with some worst-case scenarios showing 79% of original performance – Skylake in SYSMark 2014 SE Responsiveness, namely. On average, it would appear that Intel is retaining roughly 96% of its performance, based on its own internal, first-party data.

Here’s the full chart from the company:

Intel Internal Performance Numbers for Meltdown Patch

Intel plots a margin of error of +/-3%, which would place many of the findings within test variance or error. The most significant numbers do seem to align with the SYSMark responsiveness test, but are relegated primarily to Skylake with Windows 10. The more recent generations are less affected.

3DMark results and Dx11 gaming tests have shown nearly 100% performance retention, on average, with any performance variance within Intel’s declared tolerance for variance.

WebXPRT 2015 in Windows Edge, used to test photo enhancement, organization, stock option pricing, sales graphs, and DNA sequencing, showed a decay of between 10% and 5%, depending on architecture and OS.

PCMark performance is largely near original performance, sitting between 94% and 100%.

We may do more testing on the patches for third-party validation, but it will just depend on if further updates are released. For now, we’ve already tested the basics.

- Steve Burke

Last modified on January 17, 2018 at 11:53 pm

Steve Burke

Steve started GamersNexus back when it was just a cool name, and now it's grown into an expansive website with an overwhelming amount of features. He recalls his first difficult decision with GN's direction: "I didn't know whether or not I wanted 'Gamers' to have a possessive apostrophe -- I mean, grammatically it should, but I didn't like it in the name. It was ugly. I also had people who were typing apostrophes into the address bar - sigh. It made sense to just leave it as 'Gamers.'"

First world problems, Steve. First world problems.