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.