Apple Others Say Little To No Performance Hit From Security Mitigations For Cpu Flaw

Concerns about the performance hit of mitigating the security flaw in Intel, AMD and ARM processors appear to have been dramatically overblown.

The initial report in The Register suggested ‘a ballpark figure of 5-30% slow-down,’ but Intel now says that the performance impact ‘should not be significant,’ with Apple and others agreeing that this is the case …

Reuters carried the report.

Apple said in its own statement that there was no measurable hit.

Intel said in a statement after U.S. stock markets closed on Thursday that the performance impact of the recent security updates should not be significant and would be mitigated over time.

Apple earlier confirmed our speculation that iOS devices were impacted also, noting that it had included a patch in iOS 11.2.

Safari remains theoretically vulnerable to Spectre, although ‘extremely difficult’ to exploit. Apple says that it will release an update in the next few days.