Agreed, shouldn’t affect performance. But also depends on how they see best to patch the vulnerability. The microcode patch mechanism is the currently understood vector, but might not be the only way to exploit the actual underlying vulnerability.
I remember the early days of Spectre when the mitigation was “disable branch prediction”, then later they patched a more targeted, performant solution in.
I don’t think this will affect performance unless you depend on having to quickly update the CPU microcode multiple times a second.
I apologize for being glib.
Agreed, shouldn’t affect performance. But also depends on how they see best to patch the vulnerability. The microcode patch mechanism is the currently understood vector, but might not be the only way to exploit the actual underlying vulnerability.
I remember the early days of Spectre when the mitigation was “disable branch prediction”, then later they patched a more targeted, performant solution in.