The extent of the problem will be revealed with the patch

Jan 3, 2018 13:27 GMT  ·  By

A newly discovered hardware bug in multiple Intel CPUs generations that affected Windows, Linux, and Mac OS users will be fixed. The downside is that gaming performance might take a hit.

There are very few problems that can affect users from all major platforms, but a hardware bug that could, in theory, affect the security of an OS, recently identified in several Intel CPU generation managed to bring everyone together. Of course, a patch will be issued and it’s being worked on, but the solution might have some impact on performance.

The problem with hardware bugs is that they can’t really be fixed with regular patches. At best they can be mitigated. The fix, in this case, must come from Intel and it will be available in the next generation of processors, most likely. Until then, developers must work around the problem, and that usually requires taking computing power from the available CPUs resources.

The extent of the problem is not really known

From what it’s been revealed until now, the bug affects pretty many of the Intel CPUs launched in the past ten years. It’s believed that the impact on performance will vary, depending on the processor, and will range from 5% to 30%.

Since the patches for the bug have yet to be released, and the embargo is not yet lifted, details about the hardware impact are limited. As we can see from the LWN entry, only the people involved know what’s going on.

Before you start benchmarking your rig once more, you should know that it’s likely that regular people won’t be affected as much, if at all. The platforms that will most likely take a hit are cloud services such as Amazon EC2 or Azure.

Since everyone is scrambling to release a patch in the coming days, it’s likely that we’ll get much more details about the exact number and types of CPU affected, and we will know precisely is we’ll see a spike in sales for new processors that don’t have this bug.