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 6 of 8. 41 Comments.
AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU Mitigations

Moving onto the Stress-NG micro-benchmarks that stress the Linux kernel interfaces... The forking performance took around 8~9% performance hits to its performance with the default mitigations while the AMD performance was unchanged and still generally (except for the i3-2120 at auto,nosmt) still behind the Sandybridge / Ivybrudge processors.

AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU Mitigations

As we've seen already from the earlier socket benchmarks, the mitigation impact can be huge.

AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU Mitigations

The context switching performance also takes a nose dive with these default Intel CPU mitigations.

AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU Mitigations

The system V message passing performance was more than halved with the default mitigations and even hit harder when Hyper Threading was disabled. The AMD performance remained the same with its Spectre mitigations.

AMD FX vs. Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU Mitigations

The ctx_clock program is a basic program measuring how many clocks it takes to complete a context switch. The Intel Sandybridge and Ivybridge CPUs were originally multiple times faster than the AMD FX CPUs in their context switching performance but now take roughly twice as long as the AMD CPUs to perform a context switch.


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