You hear about Intel meltdown?

[Zeonx]

Apparently a bug found in Intel processors.

Kernel Leak and once they do fix it will also slow down computers by between 5% to 30%, according to some researchers.

Just wondering if anyone knew about this.

[Sebazy]

Whilst it's a pretty significant issue, the performance ramifications have been blown out of proportion somewhat. Google have already claimed their patch ended up costing them around 2.5% and they are pretty much in a worst case scenario compared to home users.

It's also interesting to note that Arm are similarly affected, whilst AMD seem to have dodged the bullet thus far. The good times just keep rolling for their CPU division.

[Zfz]

Heard about it and updated.

My take is that it affects mostly high CPU utilization applications, so you'd be talking about data centers and servers where it is important to get the most out of your CPU time. For us regular folks, the vast majority of the time our CPU isn't anywhere remotely near 100% utilization. For example I'm using a relatively old Xeon E3-1230v2 and most of the times in FFXIV I don't see anything over 70% utilization. Even if I'm hit with a 30% performance degradataion, I doubt I'd feel anything since a lot of what we feel are actually GPU related, not CPU related.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

It affects applications with a high amount of calls to the kernal. Gaming and most applications will see less than 5% impact. People love to panic.

Also, unfortunately, this is technically off topic, and will likely be closed.

[i3oi3o]

The security issue is on CPU branch prediction and CPU's cache, Small memory in CPU to reduce loading data from RAM.
This allows hacker to access information which CPU try to predict.

If the game doesn't use programming technique which utilize CPU's cache, you won't get performance hitch.
By the way, Most game architecture cause a lot of miss in CPU's cache.

[Myvar]

From what I hear, if you're the only one using your computer, you don't really have anything to worry about.

In short, this vulnerability allows any process to read the private
memory of any other process, including unencrypted passwords, if any.
If you are the only user of your computer, all the processes are yours,
and there is nothing to worry about. If you are using a shared
computer, you might want to avoid running programs like password safes
that might keep unencrypted passwords in memory. Or you can simply not
worry about it.

[Tridus]

From what I hear, if you're the only one using your computer, you don't really have anything to worry about.

Unless someone has another exploit they haven't revealed that lets code escape a browser sandbox, and then anything viewing a webpage is potentially vulnerable. We don't know of such a possible exploit right now, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The patch will mitigate the worst of it, so anyone with autoupdate on doesn't need to think about it a whole lot.

[Alien_Gamer]

Any security flaw like this is a serious issue but for most users this will be a non-issue once patched because very few programs operate in a way that could see a heavy impact from this.

Ars Technica has been publishing some articles on it that are a good read for the average person, maybe light on the technical details for IT professionals and programmers though.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018...oing-about-it/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018...erous-patches/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018...ecurity-flaws/

[Tridus]

It affects applications with a high amount of calls to the kernal. Gaming and most applications will see less than 5% impact. People love to panic.

^ This. Syscall heavy workloads suffer more. Games are relatively syscall light as are most tasks done by home users, so much so that many won't even notice (some benchmarks have shown no significant FPS impact in games). Some other workloads have seen far worse impacts.

It's not just about loading the CPU. It's about what you're loading it with specifically.

[Bashum]

Yes, I heard about it hours after it was announced, and didn't have any free money to put into AMD stock.

Their stock didn't soar as much as I was expecting, but it still jumped around 20%. Would have been a nice windfall.