Apple’s Meltdown and Spectre Patch Slows Down iOS Performance Significantly

Apple recently issued a patch for the vulnerabilities named Meltdown and Spectre, that have been found in the Intel processors. The patch should have been installed on every device that received the update, but there’s a pitfall. Despite Apple assured customers the fix won’t slow down the devices, it actually did.

An iOS user Melvin Mughal ran the benchmark test on his iPhone 6 to check the performance before and after installing the iOS 12.2.2 update. The results were somehow disappointing: single-core test showed 41% decline while multi-core test showed 39% decline. The decline can be partially related to the CPU throttling that Apple used to prevent unexpected shutdowns of older iPhone models.

Here’s the conclusion of Melvin Mughal that he posted on his website:

All numbers point to the same conclusion: it took a serious hit in performance at every possible level. A lot of benchmark levels show a significant decrease in performance on the iPhone 6 up to 50% on some benchmark levels. Although this is not the best news, this security update is a ‘necessary evil’. It demonstrates a message the security community have reminded us time and time again: security can’t be compromised over performance.

[via PhoneArena]