Happy New Year! Kicking off the new year in the world of PCs comes word of a pretty serious design flaw in Intel CPUs that apparently will require key re-designs to operating systems like Windows and Linux. And could lead to a performance hit across Intel CPU-based machines in the realm of 5 - 30%.

That is, according to this report. Which notes, "the flaw is in the Intel x86-64 hardware, and it appears a microcode update can't address it. It has to be fixed in software at the OS level, or go buy a new processor without the design blunder."

Yikes. Apparently AMD CPUs wont be affected, which means the our new gaming rig is safe for now. Due to the issue being directly related to security flaws, full details are scarce but seems to be prevalent across all Intel CPUs produced and manufactured in the last decade. So odds are, the CPU in your PC will be affected.

It's quite the fascinating revelation, so be sure to head here to read all about it.

Well this sucks.

Linux gaming unaffected so far... hopefully OK news for Windows too

it's probably something someone found with sandsifter

Won't this only affect certain functions/tasks, not the overall performance? I'm assuming that you won't suddenly see a 30% performance drop across the board with everything from web browsing to gaming.

correct, seems totally dependent on your specific workload. But it's still a big deal. If you bought an Intel CPU for Workload X and suddenly your performance drops 30% because of a software update to mitigate a hardware problem, you might have some questions.

welp, looks like I'm holding over that new cpu purchase this year

Boot times still amazing (m.2) but for some reason I'm having all sorts of networking issues using on board WIFI and connecting to the cable modem getting dogs*** speeds and then it just drops its lunch. Tethered the phone on 4g with similar results even after resetting the network in windows 10 good for 2 hours then dogs*** again.

Moving tomorrow to a place with only adsl2+ so will be interesting to see what happens.

I have noticed no differences.

i5-4690. My boot times are still super quick, probably on account of SSD.

When I say way longer I mean from literally instantaneous to a few seconds of the dotted circle twirling.

Performance still isn't as good as I'd expect but it's better since putting it on the SSD. And yeah it's a really cool game. Love the the water surface colour changes when you go to different biomes.