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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Can we avoid Windows 10 update? Frankly, I don't want to have my gaming & machine learning rigs slowed down (whatever you may say about negligible impact) and would like to opt out of this update on some of my systems. Is it possible? Or am I forced to just waste at worst 30% of my CPU cycles on mitigating this issue, even if my computer never gets into browser for more than a few seconds on very specific trusted domains?

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These patches should only affect syscall entry/exit performance. So if you're not doing things that do enormous amounts of syscalls, you should be more at the 3% end of the scale. The 30% number comes from doing things like calculating the file sizes of a directory with a lot of very small files, where the performance overhead of a single syscall matters. In most performance sensitive applications like games, you probably won't see any syscalls in a hot loop since that'd be too slow anyway. Even if you're doing heavy IO, then that is most likely also done in batch and blocked on disk IO speed, not on syscall overhead.

There are reports on Reddit that NVidia's driver is affected due to heavier usage of patched functionality which would mess with both gaming and Deep Learning. In both, 5-10% drop is pretty unacceptable as that is often basically performance offset to lower-tier card (e.g. non-Ti vs Ti card).

I have no idea when people started saying is a 30% hit on the cpu! In reality is average of <=5% : https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/7o2ctw/benchmarke...

EDIT: found it! 5-30% as reported by theregister : https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_fl...

That's just the PTI fix. On top of that runtimes recompiled with the retpoline. The question is whether the microcode update contributes an additional slowdown once used or makes the other mitigations cheaper.

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