Because of a design flaw in Intel processors chips expect slowdowns after Windows and Linux updates.
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<span style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-size:16px;">Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel's virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday</span>
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<span style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-size:16px;">Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down</span>
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Wonder why Intel CEO sold a lot of his shares a month ago?
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<a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/19/intels-ceo-just-sold-a-lot-of-stock.aspx" rel="external nofollow">https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/19/intels-ceo-just-sold-a-lot-of-stock.aspx</a>
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It'll be interesting to see what happens to cloud providers who almost universally run on Intel Xeons as a result of this. The security implications from what I understand are pretty extreme.
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This is turning out to be much worse and bigger that we thought.
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/business/computer-flaws.html" rel="external nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/business/computer-flaws.html</a>
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Thank you for that link Hazelnut. That explains more of what I was wondering.
I use Emsisoft which, through its updater, set the required reg key needed for the Windows update KB40506892 All went ok although Windows was waiting for a restart afterwards. (win 10 build 1709)
All Apple products are affected by the Meltdown and Spectre chip vulnerabilities as well as most Windows machines.
The initial reporting of this was all over the place. The headlines all said intel only when in reality it was pretty much every modern pc. There were also reports saying a 30% hit to performance when that isn't on desktop use but only linux servers. Everything thing I've seen about desktop use has shown benchmarks that are pretty much negligible in performance difference. Now that could change as the patches are updated but I haven't noticed any difference on my computers yet.
Really easy to read article about what happened and why everyone, apart from users, knew about it for seven months before it exploded on the internet info chain.