When The Register broke the massive side-channel attack flaws pertaining to Intel and other CPUs, it was reported that the users should expect a significant slowdown after installing the patches. Now, Microsoft has performed some benchmarking tests and offered a concrete idea of what you should expect.
In a post on Microsoft’s Secure blog, Terry Myerson has shared some useful insights that all Windows users should read. You might be already knowing that hardware manufacturers and kernel developers had making combined efforts after being informed of the flaws under a non-disclosure agreement.
When it comes to patching the affected systems, Meltdown and one version of Spectre will have a minimal performance impact. However, fix for the second variant of Spectre will bring more significant slowdowns and the users would notice a performance decrease in their systems.
This slowdown becomes even more worrisome for users running Windows OS on older Intel CPUs–2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU, to be precise.
That’s not all. If you’re running older versions of Windows like Windows 7 and Windows 8, an even greater impact should be expected due to legacy user-kernel transitions.
In another related development, Microsoft has pulled Meltdown and Spectre Windows patches that bricked machines running AMD-powered computers. This is reportedly affecting the older AMD processors like Athlon X2 6000+.
As per Microsoft’s statements, they are working with AMD to resolve the issue and push the updates again as soon as possible.
