Benchmarking AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPUs Following Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF, Zombieload

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 24 May 2019 at 08:56 AM EDT. Page 2 of 8. 41 Comments.
AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU Mitigations

Next up are the Sockperf synthetic benchmarks that exercises the Linux kernel's Socket API. As seen with newer CPUs, the socket throughput was noticeably degraded by all these mitigations to date on the Intel side. The AMD FX CPUs were not affected with their Spectre mitigations and saw basically the same performance. The Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs saw up to a 17% performance hit in the network throughput with the mitigations while in this particular benchmark SMT/HT isn't really relevant. This hit to the Sockperf performance took the Core i5 2400S/2500K CPUs from performing well in front of the AMD FX CPUs to just around the same performance level.

AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU Mitigations

The socket latency was also up with the default mitigations, but the Intel systems still showed lower latency than the three tested AMD FX systems.

AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU Mitigations

With the Microsoft Ethr network benchmarks, the TCP latency had increased as a result of the Intel mitigations while the AMD mitigations were about the same. Even in the mitigated state, the Intel systems had lower latency than the AMD FX hardware.

AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU Mitigations

As the last of the network tests for this article were some Golang HTTP test runs. The Intel CPUs had seen a hit to the performance with the default mitigations and more once SMT (Hyper Threading) was disabled.


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