Many readers will remember the furore over Spectre and Meltdown, security exploits that targeted CPUs from AMD and Intel, but they appear so frequently now that few announcements generally hit the headlines. When it comes to the same deal with GPUs, however, most people barely notice. But if you knew that your Intel GPU could be losing up to 20% of its compute ability because of security mitigations, that could certainly raise an eyebrow or two.
Such a performance impact comes straight from the horse's mouth, or rather via an Ubuntu bug report in this case (via Phoronix). Apparently, the developers of the Linux distro are working with Intel to have the security mitigations disabled by default, in order to recoup up to 20% of lost compute performance.
