AMD recently disclosed that its Ryzen CPUs are affected by a vulnerability called ‘Inception.’ The extent of the impact on gaming PCs was unclear until open-source news site Phoronix conducted tests to gauge the performance degradation caused by AMD’s Inception mitigations.
The Inception attack, discovered by researchers at ETH Zurich, combines two known attacks, ‘Training in Transient Execution’ and ‘Phantom speculation,’ to confuse the processor and expose it to potential data leaks. This vulnerability has the potential to affect all Zen CPUs, which is concerning for users of AMD processors.
While AMD has not yet released an official solution, it has provided mitigated microcode for ‘Family 19h’ processors. Phoronix conducted benchmark tests on an AMD EPYC 7763 processor using this microcode to assess the possible effects of Inception.
Fortunately, the tests revealed that the new mitigations have a negligible impact on user applications, providing relief for everyday tasks such as gaming, using Microsoft Office, and browsing the web. The performance decline was most significant in 7zip compression, with a decrease of around 13%. However, resource-intensive applications like MariaDB experienced more substantial performance decreases of over 50%.
While it is inevitable for new hardware vulnerabilities to be uncovered, companies like AMD take them seriously and work to mitigate their impact on consumers. For most users, Inception is unlikely to be a significant concern unless they regularly engage in heavy data processing tasks. If you are still considering AMD processors, which you should, check out our best gaming CPU list to ensure your rig is equipped with the latest and best hardware.
