Spectre and Meltdown – should you be worried?
  • yourcomputerguy
  • January 17, 2018
  • 10:22 pm
  • 0 comments
A few weeks ago, it was revealed that pretty much all modern CPUs designed after 1995 suffer from a major design defect that can be used to create critical vulnerabilities. Existence of vulnerability doesn't mean there is a way to exploit it for malicious purposes; however, I wouldn't be surprised if something is invented soon... the cybercriminals won’t miss their chance to create malware that could potentially attack most computers.

Since then, there have been some measures to mitigate the vulnerability. Microsoft released new updates for Windows but it's not enough. The system manufacturers must provide updates for their systems (BIOS and firmware) and most probably won't bother... especially for systems older than 3 years.

Apple also released updates for their most recent Macs, iPads, and iPhones but devices made more than a few years ago won't be compatible with the updates. If your Mac can't run OS X Sierra or High Sierra... well, might be time to upgrade.

The updates patching vulnerabilities will slow down most computers. The impact won't be much but it's noticeable for those who still use old hardware. General CPU and gaming performance aren't affected much, but the storage performance is. If you have a fast SSD, it will become up to 30% slower - which isn't really that big of a deal for most people. It's worse if you have a spinning hard drive... especially if it's a cheap laptop that has a 5400rpm drive. In this case, it would be best to upgrade to a Solid State Drive (SSD). Not only it will prevent your system from slowing down too much, but it will also make it perform better than when your laptop was new!

Do you want to check if your system is already protected from Spectre and Meltdown? Gibson Research Corporation has released a tool that works on all versions of Windows and can test your computer. You can download it from their website. I installed it on my computer and found that it has already been patched against Meltdown

Protection from Meltdown doesn't require any processor or motherboard firmware updates so no surprises here.

However, my system was vulnerable to Spectre! I have an HP EliteDesk business grade PC and these systems are usually supported for a long time after being released so I went to HP website and found there was an update for my system. I downloaded it, and it took about 5 minutes to install. I ran InSpectre program again and was told my system is fully protected.

Now, the performance impact... I used UserBenchmark free tool to measure the performance of my computer before and after the update.

The CPU performance was not affected at all. Graphics card (integrated Intel) and RAM became a bit faster by about 5% - not what I expected! SSD suffered but I can live with that.

Metrics Before After
Seq performance 309 MBps 277 MBps
4k performance 34 MBps 28 MBps
Deep queue 4k 151 MBps 92 MBps

I was really surprised to see such a big drop in deep queue performance but it only matters when the computer is running many programs reading and writing to storage at the same time.

So, what if you have an older system that won't get the updates? Time to upgrade it. Or take the risks - the choice is yours.

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