Major flaw in millions of Intel chips revealed
Found on BBC News on Thursday, 04 January 2018
A serious flaw in the design of Intel's chips will require Microsoft, Linux and Apple to update operating systems for computers around the world.
Experts have said that the fix could slow down the performance of computers by up to 30% but Intel played this down, saying that "for the average user, performance impacts should not be significant and will be mitigated over time".
The flaw is also likely to affect major cloud computing platforms such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google, according to The Register, which broke news of the bug.
The average user rarely makes full use of his CPU to notice; but if you ever did some video encoding or 3D renders, you now can drink a few cups of coffee more while waiting for results. However, Intel should be way more concerned and not try to downplay the impact of the bug. After all, it also affects all those who use Intel CPUs in their servers, and there a 30% performance hit can be dramatic. For many this will include buying new hardware to cope with the loss, and those customers sure won't be happy about the way Intel handles all this.