The American company Intel has released a firmware update to fix the Downfall vulnerability, which causes a decrease in the performance of branded chips after installation. It has been reported Tom’s Hardware.
The Downfall vulnerability has been found in both dedicated and server Intel processors, from Skylake to Rocket Lake. Journalists checked the effect of the patch on the operation of three processors in the Linux operating system.
Journalists noted that the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 (Ice Lake) and Xeon Gold 6226R (Cascade Lake) server, as well as the consumer Core i7-1165G7 (Tiger Lake) really showed a drop in performance.
The Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 processor showed a reduction of up to 34% when running with the OSPRay 2.12 ray tracing engine and up to about 17% when running with the Neural Magic DeepSparse 1.5 AI platform.
The Intel Xeon Gold 6226R lost up to 33% on OSPRay 2.12 and up to 20% on Neural Magic DeepSparse 1.5. The consumer Intel Core i7-1165G7 saw a drop of up to 40% in OSPRay 2.12.
According to journalists, the patch also affected the slowdown in the performance of everyday user tasks such as video encoding.
Former PC users warned About the password stealing vulnerability in Intel processors.