By: Renato Santino & #8211; Digital Look & #8211; 09.01.2018
Specter and Meltdown security holes revealed over the past week are problematic for multiple reasons. In addition to exposing users to attacks, they have an aggravating fact that fixing problems can cause processor performance to be lost, which is quite unwanted. Now, on Tuesday, 9, Microsoft has decided to detail how impactful the update can be to remedy the problem.
Overall, the update should be more impactful for older computers running operating systems, according to a publication signed by Terry Myerson, Microsoft vice president for the Windows division, on the company blog.
The company has benchmarked performance benchmarks before and after the update, however, noting that this information only refers to operating system updates released by the company itself. The company could not do with the firmware upgrades that computer makers will have to release to fix the holes in the processors.
However, if you are running Windows 10 on a slightly older processor (Microsoft mentions Intel's 4th generation Haswell chips), the impact will be greater. In these cases "there is a more significant slowness, and some users should notice a performance loss."
What if you are running an earlier version of Windows? According to Microsoft, the problem is likely to get worse with operating system versions 7 and 8, so the company describes that "most users" should notice the slowdown. The justification is that these older systems use kernel-level processor resources that are hardest hit by the Specter and Meltdown fault solutions.
Microsoft also warns Windows Server users that they need to make a decision about performance or security, as the impact on speed is significant especially if the server task is I / O intensive (input / output). .
Microsoft's statement is transparent in a way that is rarely seen in the technology industry, where updates are usually presented as always positive. The company seems to have taken this course, as note The Verge, to avoid problems such as Apple's, and the revelation that Apple was slowing processors to compensate for battery deterioration, raining processes on the company's head. Microsoft tries to present its solution as a security option, but makes it clear that there are negative counterparts, and it's not their fault, but the processor manufacturers like Intel, AMD and ARM.
