What a disastrous way to start the new year! Microsoft, Intel, and other PC manufacturers are still dealing with the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities these days.
With the Redmond based company making available a range of patches and fixes.
And although Intel has been quick to downplay the impact on performance that deploying these fixes has on devices, Microsoft has come clean and made it clear that most people will be affected — one way or another, large or small, depending on the age of their hardware.
The software titan chose to be transparent on this, with Terry Myerson, the Executive Vice President of the Windows and Devices Group addressing the issue in a detailed blog post.
Long story short, there are two variants of Spectre, hence why there are three exploits.
According to Myerson, Microsoft supports 45 versions of Windows, 41 of which have patches available, which you can check out here at this link.
Owners of modern Windows 10 PCs with newer Intel chips have less of a reason to worry about performance impact, as deploying the Windows security patches plus the additional firmware updates necessary will not have a big impact on performance.
However, owners of devices with Intel Haswell processors, as well as Windows 7 and 8 systems, will have to adjust to much more significant performance impacts. Ditto for servers, with Myerson revealing that they will see a major drop.
Basically, as you can guess, Terry Myerson is not all that optimistic, with the Microsoft executive promising to publish all of their gathered data on the performance hits in the coming weeks.
It ranges from single digit to double digit degrades.
What a disastrous way to start the new year!
