Why? Because it says That's hardly descriptive of the level of impact. That statement is equally valid if it impacts 99% of AMDs CPUs vs 1% of Intels, or vise versa. Without hard numbers, it's impossible to say which company has the worst of it, since we don't know what percentage is vulnerable. Even so, that doesn't change the fact that I prefer AMD CPUs over Intel's. While AMD doesn't have the fastest chips on the market, they're cheaper, use less power, don't run quite as hot, and provide competition for Intel. All of which are more important to me than if this flaw impacts AMD chips as well.
This is America, of course, they can be sued. The only thing more important than gutting social programs to Americans is the ability to sue somebody over something.
According to the Verge, MS issued the update on January 3. Microsoft is issuing a rare out-of-band security update to supported versions of Windows today. The software update is part of a number of fixes that will protect against a newly-discovered processor bug in Intel, AMD, and ARM chipsets. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the company will issue a Windows update that will be automatically applied to Windows 10 machines at 5PM ET / 2PM PT today. The update will also be available for older and supported versions of Windows today, but systems running operating systems like Windows 7 or Windows 8 won’t automatically be updated through Windows Update until next Tuesday. Windows 10 will be automatically updated today. Checking my home machine, it applied a security update on January 5: This update KB4056892 makes an opaque reference to security issues: So, it came and no one noticed.
I did notice something changed my background color to puke-green and set the windows start sound to play. This almost made me lose my lunch. But in terms of actual performance, both subjective observation (no one noticed) and objective measurement shows no change at all. You may now resume a chorus of "The Sky is Falling!!!!"
Here's a more comprehensive analysis of the impacts platform by platform. Ars Technica link The concern is primarily for cloud servers and vm servers where the host had to be protected to avoid compromises by an application running on one customer's machine from getting access to another customer's memory. Servers for the major cloud services have been updated. Dunno about where wordforge runs. It could be that if a web server is on a non-updated machine that other customers could load malicious code to their VMs. Changes to these servers may impact some customers' performance levels. Hopefully all servers will get the update soon. Until then I'd probably change sensitive passwords (i.e. financial sites) to be different from your less sensitive passwords (i.e. wordforge, pornhub, bittorrents). It seems some holes in the code may remain until all applications are rebuilt using updated compilers. These however are not as important as browsers' java scripting code which has been updated for both Edge, Firefox, and Chrome. It's unlikely that malicious code is present in earlier compiles of other applications, but hey, malicious code is part and parcel of stuff you download. Be careful out there.
On the other hand, the older/cheaper PC took a 3% hit on the CPU score. It appears to have impacted integer operations on this older generation I3. This is significant. The I3-540 was launched Q1 2010. The later 4th gen I3 (compared above) launched Q3 2014 and has enhanced instruction sets that may account for its not being impacted. Before and after. Only change is the CPU which dropped 14 points or 3.2% (14/437*100): software update was applied on January 4:
Don't feel bad. It has taken me years of careful addition, and tweaking, to get my system where it is now, and I know it barely reaches what some would call a "mid-gaming level" machine. The biggest investment was my graphics card, a Zotac Nvidia GTX 1050 2 GB. For most gamers, that's a joke, but I love it, and I can watch TV on one monitor (an old 17" LCD I kept from years ago), while writing on the main monitor, and it works just fine, so I'm pleased with that. The drop, it seems, was negligible, which is a relief, because I don't have money to improve things. The graphics card, alone, took a year to save up for, so I'm pleased that only a single digit changed, and even that falls within the realm of normal operation.
And we have an answer! And MS has had to issue an emergency patch because Intel's patch was utter shite.
