AMD has finally fixed its latest security flaw, but however at a cost – massive slowdowns. AMD is at the moment patching up inception, but the end results on the other hand are not what users are expecting, not really great.
AMD Fixed Latest Security Flaw
Tech Company AMD for some time lately has been rolling out several updates to its Zen processors in a bid to help mitigate the inception vulnerability that was just recently discovered. But it however appears that there is a catch to the whole thing.
The Linux website Phoronix has for some time now been benchmarking the CPUs post update and the results are not all good news in regards to performance: in some reported cases, tasks were 54% slower than those that were run on unpatched chips.
Some apps on the other hand, such as 7zip, Blender, and Firefox, did not take too much of a hit, although 7Zrip however performed the worst out of all the three mentioned and affected. However, industry-grade software as you should know appeared to suffer much more.
How the Affected Chips Performed
Database app MariaDB, for example, performed much worse on patched Epyc server processors. Other applications as you should know that are related to code compilation, engineering, and even image processing were all also impacted much similarly.
AMD has reportedly been patching its affected chips in three different mediums: some of them have kernel-based mitigation, some on the other hand have new microcode, and others that have been affected have Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier (IBPB) mitigation applied. The latter as you should know is considered to be the most secure fix, but it is also the most often responsible for the worst slowdowns.
Other Similar Security Issues
This as you should know is not the first time a major CPU flaw has caused problems and issues. Intel already had the infamous Meltdown/ Spectre flaws in many of its processors prior to this and AMD also was affected partially too, which reportedly allowed threat actors to read system memory and then gain valuable pieces of information, such as passwords and even encryption keys.
Intel Made Matters Worse in Trying To Fix the Problem
In a bid to try to fix the said problem with a firmware patch, Intel unwittingly made systems borderline quite unusable, thus causing spontaneous reboots as well as instability issues. The company then issued out a directive to all personnel and businesses that are involved in the supply chain of its chips, and this is including end-users, not to download the patch.
Other Recent Security Issues Faced By the CPU Giants
More recently, both CPU titans in the industry were found to have another security issue in their respective products, which is very much similar to Meltdown and Spectre, known as Retbleed, which allowed abusers to get access to kernel memory. Fixing this very issue again simply means inevitably slowing down the performance of the chip.
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