The Performance Impact Of MDS / Zombieload Plus The Overall Cost Now Of Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS

The Memcached performance continues to see a large hit on the Intel systems tested compared to the minor impact on the AMD hardware.

Ditto for the Nginx web server...

The JetStream 2 JavaScript benchmark saw 2~3% lower performance with the AMD systems while the Intel systems with their default mitigations could be easily lower by 10% or more.

The increased time needed for various common OS operations following the mitigations.

If looking at the geometric mean for the tests run today, the Intel systems all saw about 16% lower performance out-of-the-box now with these default mitigations and obviously even lower if disabling Hyper Threading for maximum security. The two AMD systems tested saw a 3% performance hit with the default mitigations. While there are minor differences between the systems to consider, the mitigation impact is enough to draw the Core i7 8700K much closer to the Ryzen 7 2700X and the Core i9 7980XE to the Threadripper 2990WX.

More Linux mitigation benchmarks are coming up on Phoronix in the days ahead.