Intel slows down processors by 40% due to Downfall vulnerability

The American company Intel has released a firmware update to fix the Downfall vulnerability, which, once installed, led to a decrease in the performance of its chips. It is reported by Tom’s Hardware.

The Downfall vulnerability has been detected in both user and server Intel processors — from Skylake to Rocket Lake. Journalists tested the impact of the patch on the operation of three processors in the Linux operating system.

The Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 (Ice Lake) and Xeon Gold 6226R (Cascade Lake) server processors, as well as the consumer Core i7−1165G7 (Tiger Lake), did indeed show a decrease in performance, the journalists stated.

The Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 processor showed a drop of up to 34% when running the OSPRay 2.12 ray tracing engine and about 17% when running the Neural Magic DeepSparse 1.5 AI platform.

Intel Xeon Gold 6226R lost up to 33% in OSPRay 2.12 and up to 20% in Neural Magic DeepSparse 1.5. The consumer Intel Core i7−1165G7 showed a decrease in OSPRay 2.12 of up to 40%.

According to journalists, the patch also affected the speed of performing everyday tasks such as video rendering.