Disabling Intel Graphics Security Mitigations Can Boost GPU Compute Performance By 20%
www.phoronix.com

While not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a 20% performance boost. Ubuntu maker Canonical in cooperation with Intel is preparing to disable these security mitigations in the Ubuntu packages in order to recoup this lost performance. […]

  • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    “After discussion between Intel and Canonical’s security teams, we are in agreement that Spectre no longer needs to be mitigated for the GPU at the Compute Runtime level. At this point, Spectre has been mitigated in the kernel, and a clear warning from the Compute Runtime build serves as a notification for those running modified kernels without those patches. For these reasons, we feel that Spectre mitigations in Compute Runtime no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance tradeoff.”

    Seems like the Spectre mitigations were applied for GPU compute as well.

    1 to 5 percentage points is not great, but in and around the margin of error. 20% is a huge performance delta.