I wonder if this is because Google knows about an exploit that hasn't been released yet or because it just makes sense given the side channel attacks we've already seen on CPUs.
Is there any information on the performance impact of this change? The article says they've reduced the impact and gives a single example but I'd be interested to see a proper benchmark of a system with these patches installed.
I can imagine most of a powerful core's performance going unused if the operating system isn't doing anything special and a multithreaded workload is trying to get a lot of work done. The same can likely be true for systems still rocking a dual core design, where "one core for important stuff and one for applications" can be quite taxing on system responsiveness.
Is there any information on the performance impact of this change? The article says they've reduced the impact and gives a single example but I'd be interested to see a proper benchmark of a system with these patches installed.
I can imagine most of a powerful core's performance going unused if the operating system isn't doing anything special and a multithreaded workload is trying to get a lot of work done. The same can likely be true for systems still rocking a dual core design, where "one core for important stuff and one for applications" can be quite taxing on system responsiveness.