IT industry is still trying to assess consequences of recently discovered vulnerabilities in Intel CPU architecture, that were given names Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown mostly affects Intel processors that were released in the last 20 years, Apple A processors, some ARM Cortex cores, while AMD seems to be unaffected. Spectre, however, affects almost every processor.
To reduce the threat developers came up with multiple solutions, anything from drivers to OS updates. Microsoft did not make us wait for long and have released some updates for Windows 10 already. The main drawback of those solutions is that they may reduce computers speed significantly. Microsoft released following information about the patches.
For Windows 10 PCs with Intel Skylake, Kaby Lake or newer processors a productivity decrease will be unnoticeable to the majority of users.
For Windows 10 PCs with Intel Haswell or older processors a productivity decrease will be noticeable to some users.
For Windows 8 or 7 PCs with Intel Haswell or older processors a productivity decrease will affect most of the processes and will be noticeable to all.
However, as we noted it is not only Intel and Microsoft’s problem. Apple a while to react to the issue and in the end they promised to update Safari, an internet browser (which has little to no effect on the underlying problem with CPUs).
If you notice a that your computer started working slower, do not worry. There are way to upgrade your computer for a fraction of a price of a new PC.