The Specter V2 patch comes with a performance penalty of up to 36% on Intel processors

Very bad news for Intel processor owners. The patch for the new V2 exploit brings serious performance penalties, including on the latest Alder Lake processors.

The update is already available for Linux and has already been integrated into the mainline kernel, but the results are extremely poor. On the Core i9-12900K, the patch comes with a 26.7% decrease in performance in Sockperf-type operations, while in other types of operations the penalty is between 2 and 14.5%.

On older processors, the numbers look even worse. Intel 11th Gen i7-1185G7 is chosen with a handicap of up to 35.6% in Sockperf after applying the patch, while in other types of applications the penalty is between 2 and 26.1%. The tests were performed by Phoronix.

Normally I would recommend that you keep up to date with security updates, but in this case the performance penalty is exaggeratedly high, especially on older configurations.

If you do not process important data and are not in an environment prone to cyber attacks, it is best to avoid the following BIOS updates.

If there are such high performance limitations on Alder Lake, I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like on Kaby Lake or Skylake. When the computing power is reduced by more than 50%, the processor becomes good to throw away.

The bad news is that you can’t even roll back, as most motherboards now have BIOS capsules that can’t be downgraded.