Microsoft warns: Specter and Meltdown patching variably affects performance on Windows computers

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When Specter and Meltdown came to the fore, possible solutions began to arrive in the form of theories. The threat could be corrected through patches No problem, what the Terminator would say. The fact is that in these situations there is always a but and this time was not going to be any different."

With the patches that were going to be released, computers could be slowed down, at least in the case of. The solutions were going to have an impact on the performance of PCs and servers and it only remained to be calibrated what would be the real loss of performance that they caused.This was in principle something that had to be corroborated, it was a theory until an authorized voice confirmed it. And that's what they've done at Microsoft.

The American company has already given its reading of the performance offered by the patch that comes to correct the disaster of Meltdown and Specter and its conclusions are those that many users did not even want to read. Some conclusions that Microsoft has published today in its blog dedicated to the cloud.

Variable yield losses

They have measured the impact of the patches to mitigate Specter and Meltdown on computers running Windows in any of its versions and have reached the following conclusions in which a variable affectation is appreciated.

On computers running Windows 10 and processors Skylake, Kabylake, or newer (those released in 2016 or later) the differences they are minimal.Post-patch benchmarks show minimal slowdowns so hopefully users won't notice any performance loss.

If we go down one step and continue in Windows 10 but now with computers that have Haswell processors or older (in 2015 or older) here the performance tests do offer differences. They are small, but superior to what we saw before. The teams here can suffer slowdowns that can be appreciated on occasions by users. Yes, there is a decrease in system performance.

On computers with versions of Windows 8 and Windows 7 and with Haswell or older processors, the _benchmarks_ performed after the patch show a decrease in system performance appreciable by a majority of users.

On machines with Windows Server and regardless of the processor they have, the _benchmarks_ performed after the patch show detect a performance impact significant.So much so that from Redmond they recommend evaluating the risk and return relationship on a case-by-case basis to determine if it is interesting for them to apply the patch.

The tests distinguish between variants 1 and 2 of Specter and a variant number three that corresponds to Meltdown. And of the three number two is the one that affects the equipment and systems the most.

Therefore, and despite the fact that many defended the contrary, it seems that yes, that the patches released to solve the problems in Windows computers due to the design failure of the processors they do cause performance losses Not significant in all cases, but yes in some, something that has already been verified in some cloud-based environments where performance loss has already caused some inconvenience.

Source | Microsoft Blog In Xataka Windows | Users claim that Microsoft security update blocks computers with AMD Athlon processors