The Price of Meltdown and Spectre
Benedict Herzog, Stefan C. Reif, Julian Preis, Wolfgang Schröder‐Preikschat, Timo Hönig · 2021
The Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities shocked hardware manufacturers and system users upon discovery. Numerous attack vectors and mitigations have been developed and deployed. However, due to the deep entanglement in core CPU components they will be an important topic for years. Although the performance overhead of software mitigations has been examined closely, the energy overhead has experienced little attention---even though the energy demand is a critical cost factor in data centres.