More Benchmarks Of The Initial Performance Hit From CVE-2019-14615 On Intel Gen7 Graphics

On Wednesday I shined the light on the initial performance hit from Intel's CVE-2019-14615 graphics vulnerability particularly striking their "Gen7" graphics hard. That initial testing was done with Core i7 hardware while here are results looking at the equally disturbing performance hits from Core i3 and i5 affected processors too.

This article offers some benchmarks with Core i3/i5 results added in alongside the i7 CPUs previously tested with the Gen7 graphics found most commonly with Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors. Each distinct system was tested before/after from the CVE-2019-14615 posted on Wednesday.

The good news though as already shared in the earlier article is that while the current "Gen9" graphics are affected, their mitigation causes virtually no performance difference. In laptop testing I also haven't found that mitigation to cause any power increase. The other "good" news is that Intel's engineers are ultimately aiming for the Gen7 mitigation to have no performance hit either. As shared this morning, they are aiming for no performance loss in their "final version" of the patches. But when that final version comes considering this vulnerability has apparently already been known to Intel for months is another story. But at least these pre-final Gen7 mitigation patches aren't being merged to the mainline kernel.

In any case, here is what the initial mitigation patches for CVE-2019-14615 are looking like on more hardware, a variety of different Ivy Bridge and Haswell systems I still had running fine in the benchmarking server room.




All of the results are quite brutal across all of the systems/processors tested, but at least for now holding out hope that later patch revisions will address the performance loss. Stay tuned for more benchmarks with the evolution for this mitigation.

On a geometric mean basis across all tested Ivybridge/Haswell CPUs, it's close to halving the performance especially on Haswell. All those initial benchmark results via this OpenBenchmarking.org page.