You hear about Intel meltdown?

[Zeonx]

Apparently a bug found in Intel processors.

Kernel Leak and once they do fix it will also slow down computers by between 5% to 30%, according to some researchers.

Just wondering if anyone knew about this.

[Sebazy]

Whilst it's a pretty significant issue, the performance ramifications have been blown out of proportion somewhat. Google have already claimed their patch ended up costing them around 2.5% and they are pretty much in a worst case scenario compared to home users.

It's also interesting to note that Arm are similarly affected, whilst AMD seem to have dodged the bullet thus far. The good times just keep rolling for their CPU division.

[Zfz]

Heard about it and updated.

My take is that it affects mostly high CPU utilization applications, so you'd be talking about data centers and servers where it is important to get the most out of your CPU time. For us regular folks, the vast majority of the time our CPU isn't anywhere remotely near 100% utilization. For example I'm using a relatively old Xeon E3-1230v2 and most of the times in FFXIV I don't see anything over 70% utilization. Even if I'm hit with a 30% performance degradataion, I doubt I'd feel anything since a lot of what we feel are actually GPU related, not CPU related.

[aesteval]

Heard about it and updated.

My take is that it affects mostly high CPU utilization applications, so you'd be talking about data centers and servers where it is important to get the most out of your CPU time. For us regular folks, the vast majority of the time our CPU isn't anywhere remotely near 100% utilization. For example I'm using a relatively old Xeon E3-1230v2 and most of the times in FFXIV I don't see anything over 70% utilization. Even if I'm hit with a 30% performance degradataion, I doubt I'd feel anything since a lot of what we feel are actually GPU related, not CPU related.

Don't forget that XIV performance also relies on server performance. "Server limitations" is a known phrase for us.

[i3oi3o]

Don't forget that XIV performance also relies on server performance. "Server limitations" is a known phrase for us.

I think FF14's server is designed to scale.

Very likely, they choose available server instance which don't have much load and spawn a process to run.
Imaging this process as dungeon instance, each world map etc.

Not likely that a process will consume a lot of CPU except one scenario, 100 people enter the same map to hunt Rank S which very likely causes the process to consume CPU to almost full.

[aesteval]

I think FF14's server is designed to scale.

Very likely, they choose available server instance which don't have much load and spawn a process to run.
Imaging this process as dungeon instance, each world map etc.

Not likely that a process will consume a lot of CPU except one scenario, 100 people enter the same map to hunt Rank S which very likely causes the process to consume CPU to almost full.

I'm actually thinking about everything to do with inventory and items in XIV's case. We're getting a saddlebag and not more inventory slots for a reason. However it's been designed would be with a certain margin of performance expectations in mind and if the servers do take a performance hit because of this it could be a really nasty goal post shift. A lot of speculation, but concerns (we don't know what hardware the servers are even running or what risk there may be to leave them unpatched.)

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

It affects applications with a high amount of calls to the kernal. Gaming and most applications will see less than 5% impact. People love to panic.

Also, unfortunately, this is technically off topic, and will likely be closed.

[Tridus]

It affects applications with a high amount of calls to the kernal. Gaming and most applications will see less than 5% impact. People love to panic.

^ This. Syscall heavy workloads suffer more. Games are relatively syscall light as are most tasks done by home users, so much so that many won't even notice (some benchmarks have shown no significant FPS impact in games). Some other workloads have seen far worse impacts.

It's not just about loading the CPU. It's about what you're loading it with specifically.

[Bashum]

Yes, I heard about it hours after it was announced, and didn't have any free money to put into AMD stock.

Their stock didn't soar as much as I was expecting, but it still jumped around 20%. Would have been a nice windfall.

[i3oi3o]

The security issue is on CPU branch prediction and CPU's cache, Small memory in CPU to reduce loading data from RAM.
This allows hacker to access information which CPU try to predict.

If the game doesn't use programming technique which utilize CPU's cache, you won't get performance hitch.
By the way, Most game architecture cause a lot of miss in CPU's cache.