On 2018-01-04 15:28:17 +0000, chrisv said:
Designed By India H1B Engineers wrote:

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, depending on the task and the
processor model.

This is ugly. Think of the large computing centers, for example
Google's data centers. Suddenly, they will need significantly more
CPU time, and thus electricity (and thus carbon), to get the job done?

It aint just Intel either. The three different CPU issues affect chips
from Intel, AMD, and ARM (no mention anywhere of PowerPC or Apple's own
A-series), and affect virtually all devices sold in the last 15 years -
computers, tablets, smartphones, etc.!

That's gonna be one heck of a clean up bill! :-(


Apple has already partially fixed the problems in the MacOS X High
Sierra update 10.13.2 (with no noticeable performance slow-down) and
further fixes due in the up-coming 10.13.3 update currently in beta
testing.

Users of old versions of OS X may well be stuck though and not get any update.