Intel CPUs: Upcoming OS updates might bring up to 30 % loss in performance

Guest · 03 January 2018, 11:52 AM

According to "The Register" almost all Intel CPUs sold in the last decade suffer from a massive design flaw that can compromise the security of the machine.

To fix this, all major operating systems have to be updated accordingly. The problem: These security updates will mean a decrease in CPU performance of up to 30 percent. This will undoubtedly also hit common virtualisation environments including Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine, render farms etc.

AMD CPUs are not affected, yet it is unclear at the moment if those security updates will be forced upon AMD-based systems regardless.

If you're thinking about buying a new machine with an Intel CPU, you might want to wait until it is clear that the respective CPU model is not affected by this.

**gwpriester** · 03 January 2018, 12:56 PM

Arg! Thanks for the heads up on that. One more thing to worry/obsess about.

**handrawn** · 03 January 2018, 01:30 PM

my main beast is AMD

since INTEL and AMD cpu have different addressing don't think that the INTEL updates will be active even if they are installed

thanks

seems the actual effect this will have on performance for INTEL is going to vary with setup

**mwenz** · 03 January 2018, 01:37 PM

I'm more concerned with direct application effects than any slow down per se. Knowing MS, it's likely they will break something else in the process of patching and that could affect applications whatever chip is used. (I too am running AMD.)

**handrawn** · 03 January 2018, 01:45 PM

true enough - but you could say that is part of the fun of every major MS update.....

video editing/rendering and latency-free music mastering are very cpu sensitive - so I'll certainly be keeping an eye on performance there

**mwenz** · 03 January 2018, 02:46 PM

Ya know, with the exception of one font related bug in either 7 or 8 that was subsequent fixed, I've never experienced such update bugs as seen in 10. Makes me wanna roll back to 8.1.

**handrawn** · 03 January 2018, 05:12 PM

the step changes have been iffy - updates like 'creators' I installed manually using the media creation tool MS supply for download - I am tempted to do a clean install of the ceators fall and reinstall everything, it's a question of time

most of the problems I've seen seem to stem from the piecemeal updating, and with changes to things like screen rendering that some programs are not up to speed with...and so need patching