Intel's Downfall Mitigations Drop Performance Up to 39%, Tests Show

Well, CPU's aren't getting much faster generation by generation, so they've gotta find a new way to make the new ones more enticing.

So after 7 generations of improving performance by 3-5% a generation nearly all of those gains have been wiped away by a single bug, and other than the newly supported architecture, instruction sets, core count and gains in raw clock speed, there is essentially no compute difference between a 6700k and a 13700k?

Shame, guess you have to buy the next gen CPU from Intel, which will surely not have any exploits.

Once again I ask:

1) are all these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild today?

2) since everyone is running mitigations, no one is spending much time to exploit them, so why shouldn't I turn them off myself?

Every time there's a new vulnerability out, I ask the same question and I still don't have a valid reason why I should keep them on. Herd immunity does not only apply to viruses.

In fact, the slower our CPUs get because of these fiascos, the more performance I might squeeze out of something no one is exploiting in the wild, unless I have proof of the contrary.

Of course, this works only if I disregard anyone's opinion and do it. If everybody turns off mitigations, then I'm unprotected.

Uh wait a sec, this is a microcode update? that will just install without any notice?

Probably should have linked to the source that made the efforts to produce the benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-downfall-benchmarks

shouldn't we all get a refund check for 39% of the price we paid for a CPU?

Yikes.

Is AMD affected by anything like this at the moment?

Might be time for per virtual cpu core speculation only cache.