Last week Intel released new CPU microcode for a number of processor generations due to the Training Solo vulnerability and Branch Privilege Injection. In this article today are some benchmarks looking at the performance difference from simply upgrading to the new CPU microcode on an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake” desktop system.
Published last week was new Intel CPU microcode for many generations of processors. On the Intel Arrow Lake side for those latest-generation processors it was their first time publishing new CPU microcode via the Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Data-Files. There was also a first update for the Lunar Lake CPU microcode there too.
While new Linux kernel mitigations were also rolled out as part of the Training Solo vulnerability going public, the article today is just looking at the CPU microcode performance difference for the latest Arrow Lake processors. Tests on prior generation Intel CPUs requiring the new kernel changes and more will be coming in a follow-up article.
Today’s testing was done on an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K desktop running Linux 6.15-rc7 as of Sunday while using the 0x117 CPU microcode and then upgrading to the new 0x118 CPU microcode released last week. No other changes were made to the system besides upgrading from 0x117 to 0x118 CPU microcode for Arrow Lake.
On the whole there wasn’t much of a performance difference observed out of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K….
But for some classes of workloads the 0x118 CPU microcode did bring some minor performance hits:
Several OpenJDK Java workloads were observing slightly worse performance when using the new 0x118 Arrow Lake microcode.
PostgreSQL database performance was also slightly lower with the new Intel Core Ultra 9 “Arrow Lake” CPU microcode.
And minor performance changes in other select workloads but for the most part the Intel Arrow Lake performance was flat with the new 0x118 CPU microcode release. While some performance penalties observed with the new CPU microcode, at least Intel Arrow Lake on Linux is much faster now than when the CPUs first launched last year.
Stay tuned for more Intel CPU microcode and kernel mitigation benchmarks on other Intel CPU families.
