About a month ago, Zenbleed was discovered, a vulnerability that affects Ryzen 3000 processors and all their Zen 2-based versions and will be fixed by a microcode update. When these types of vulnerabilities are patched The most normal thing is that there will be some loss of performancealthough this can vary depending on many factors.

Tom’s Hardware wanted to get ahead of AMD and forced a software update which, as they themselves suggest, is a benchmark inefficient because as soon as we restart the PC it stops working. However, this solution allowed them to perform a first performance analysis to assess how the final update to remove Zenbleed could affect Ryzen 3000 performance, and the truth is that the results are better than expected.

In short, the loss of gaming performance suffered by Ryzen 9 3950X and Ryzen 5 3600 is almost zero which means that if we use the PC to play games and we are worried that we will have to choose between security and performance, we can be sure, because after installing the update against Zenbleed, the difference will be minimal.

However, in coding applications that use AVX instructions, the performance degradation is significant and ranges from between 5% and 15%. In other demanding applications, such as the C-Ray renderer, we have a performance loss of 9%, and in the synthetic CPU-Z test, the drop is 7%.

Considering the overall balance, we can conclude that the performance loss represented by the update against Zenbleed is small and that when implemented via a microcode update This impact could be significantly reduced. However, until it is published and the first evidence emerges, we cannot confirm anything.

As I told you at the beginning of the article, this vulnerability affects all processors and APUs based on the Zen 2 architecture, which includes models within the Ryzen 4000 series as well as some Ryzen 5000 series models for laptops. Interestingly, the current generation of consoles also uses the Zen 2 architecture, albeit in a modified version that, as I told you earlier, has less L3 cache and trimmed floating point units.

If all goes according to plan, official microcode updates are likely to address this vulnerability for mainstream Zen 2 processors. They will start arriving in October of this year, although its general availability may vary depending on the results obtained by AMD.