New Surface Pro 3 Firmware just recieved - new Spectre update?

[GreyFox7]

Surface Pro 3 Firmware is dated 1/24/2018 v 3.11.2350.0

I assume this is the new corrected (Spectre) Intel firmware for Haswell.

There is no information on this anywhere at the moment

 

[GreyFox7]

Heads up, not surprising that this Firmware update does NOT change the state of the Spectre override setting.

If you previously, as advised, disabled Spectre variant 2 then you will have to enable it and reboot to have the protection from this new firmware.

Performance with this firmware should be better IMO than the previous firmware Spectre patch. Passmark still doesn't like it but here's why I think it's not at bad as before.

First of all the passmark total score is -17% with the latest firmware vs -18.4% with the previous.
However there is what I think is an anomaly with Passmark getting very bad 2D Graphics scores which is negatively affecting the Total score so IMO the Total score should be higher.

More good news with this latest firmware. The 3D graphics, memory, disk, & CPU scores all improved with this latest firmware. Given this is directly related to memory access and management we could surmise the memory score would be the most significant.

The Memory score improved 5.6% from the previous firmware, down only 2.8% from baseline vs -8.3% with the previous Spectre patched firmware.

CPU performance improved 0.54% from baseline vs -1.7% with previous firmware or 2.24% improvement from previous firmware.

Disk performance is also up 3.4% from the previous firmware.

Disregarding the atrocious -47% 2D graphics performance in Passmark which I think must be some sort of test specific anomaly the overall performance may not be significantly or noticeably different than the baseline performance from before any Meltdown/Spectre patches were applied.

YMMV.

 

[GreyFox7]

After several days of testing I haven't noticed any of the lag that was present with the previous firmware version at all.