AMD Inception Fix Results in Up to 54% Drop in Performance

AMD has recently fixed a vulnerability, but this then left a negative impact on its overall performance. The tests on multiple types of workloads with the Epyc or Linux system reduced its performance by 54%.

AMD Epyc 7763 System-Based System Results Show Differences in Tests From Before and After the Update

According to Tom's Hardware, the news recently broke out about an Inception vulnerability, and only lately has there been critical observation into the mitigations' impact. With that, a recently uploaded eight-page result was uploaded regarding Phoronix, which centers on the Linux operating system.

By utilizing the AMD Epyc 7763 system, the site tried to conduct tests on different apps to find the difference before and after the patch. The AMD Epyc 7763 is a Zen 3-based system. Depending on the workload, some people might not see much difference.

MariaDB 4096 Showed the Worst Performance Drop From the Tests, Resulting in a 54% Decrease From Its Pre-Test Results

However, on certain tasks, they found that the performance saw a 54% drop after the patch compared to its numbers before the patch. These were specifically for test processes MariaDB 4096, while other tests like the 7zip saw a 13% drop, and the Firefox Speedometer displayed a 1.2% drop.

Despite that, there were also some improvements, with the DaCapo improving by 33%, the Linux Compilation defconfig increasing by 29%, and Gimp rotate time increasing by 28%. Other notable increases include the Open Radioss at 27% and the Apache Spark at an increased 17%.

Three Familiar Apps Didn't See Much Changes From Before and After the Mitigation of the New Patch

It was reported that 7zip, Blender, and Firefox were three familiar apps that did not see many performance changes after the mitigations of the AMD Inception. Out of the three, the most affected app was 7zip, a compression app, but most people don't always use it on a regular basis.

The most serious consequences when it comes to a drop in performance can be seen in MariaDB. The results show how it was significantly impacted through the Epyc system patch showing the biggest decline compared to other apps.

Phoronix Shbowed Changes in Different Data Selections as an Effect of the AMD Inception Mitigation

For those that go to Phoronix, there are more changes in different data selections as an effect of the AMD Inception mitigation either being turned off or on. The other configurations are also expected to bring three levels of patching.

One of these levels will be mitigations for purely kernel-based technologies, while the others will use newer microcodes. The last one was using the Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier (IBPD) mitigation.

Tom's Hardware also reported that IBPD was often found to show bad performance when it came to all mitigations. However, this wasn't always the case, and there were rare instances where IBPD wasn't the worst performer.