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Comment by brndnmtthws | Hacker News Reader

> Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.

Given the lack of any facts, evidence, or details in the press release, how is anyone supposed to take Intel seriously?

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Devils advocate.

Workload dependence... average user... not significant:

A lot of users probably see "30%" and will assume the worst. There really isn't a lot of evidence of how much an average consumer will be affected. Pretty sure your average consumer isn't running pgbench all day. Hell, I'm willing to bargain 90% of servers (I really want to say more) are over-provisioned by 30% or more.

Mitigated over time:

Kernels are getting out safe patches ASAP, performance be damned. With more time to be careful, performance can be clawed back. And/or CPUs are upgrade and features such as PCID mitigate perf losses.

The problem is that "average users" pointedly does not include server and DB admins. I don't know about anyone else, but that's what I'm sweating over. We already know high I/O is what takes the biggest hit. I want to know what kind of a hit I can expect on our MSSQL VMs, and I am pretty sure the answer is not "minimal."

If you're running SQL in a VM ... I'm pretty sure I know how to improve your performance by 30%.

If you mean run on bare metal, not happening, due to MSFT's outrageous core pricing model. They force you to license every core available to the OS, whether you need the capacity or not. Running in a VM is the only way of getting around that requirement.

If you mean run something other than MSSQL — also not happening. Vendor lock in.

Given the potential slowdowns to be expected by the kernel fixes, I am not expecting a jolly January.

I work for a database vendor.

Considering Intel's dominance in the server space, I don't anyone is worried about the average user here

I mean, I am. I have a really nice laptop that I'd rather not have to replace.

Maybe wait until next week to decide if it needs replacing?

If you have malicious applications running on your laptop you have bigger problems already...

Malicious JS is fairly common on laptops... just see all the cryptominers.

The "put a big moat around it" approach to security should be put to rest. We isolate system processes and user accounts for good reason.

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