Google says CPU patches cause ‘negligible impact on performance’ with new technique
Google just gave chipmakers some much needed good news. In a post on the company’s Online Security Blog, two Google engineers described a novel chip-level patch that has been deployed across the company’s entire infrastructure, resulting in only minor declines in performance in most cases. The company has also posted details of the new technique, called Retpoline, in the hopes that other companies will be able to follow the same technique. If the claims hold, it would mean Intel and others have avoided the catastrophic slowdowns that many had predicted.
“There has been speculation that the deployment of KPTI causes significant performance slowdowns,” the post reads, referring to the company’s “Kernel Page Table Isolation” technique. “Performance can vary, as the impact of the KPTI mitigations depends on the rate of system calls made by an application. On most of our workloads, including our cloud infrastructure, we see negligible impact on performance.”
