About Performance on PCs and Macs
If you see your PC performing poorly in the next weeks or months, well, shucks, that's intended!
After the reveal that Apple is slowing down older iPhones to prevent from shutting off unexpectedly, a similar thing could come to PCs and Macs, albeit not to prevent from random shutdowns, but because of security.
The problem lies within a huge security bug in Intel Processors build in the last 10 years. This bug allows normal programs like a Browser or Word to access the protected Kernel memory.
Think of the kernel as God sitting on a cloud, looking down on Earth. It’s there, and no normal being can see it, yet they can pray to it.
This security bug opens up this cloud so other can see it. This leads to a huge security issue because programs can read the Kernel and extract sensitive information like user passwords.
But what has this for an impact on performance? The problem is that this is a construction problem and can not easily be fixed without any big changes to the processor.
So to protect the Kernel from malicious programs the Operating System now needs to defend it. This will, in turn, lead to a drop in performance because the OS now needs to do more work to protect its heart (the Kernel) from malicious programs. Tests have shown that this leads to a 5% to 30% drop in performance on Windows, Linux and Mac. Some users may see changes in performance, others won't. Really, this shouldn’t be needed, but clearly, there is a flaw in Intel’s silicon that allows kernel access protections to be bypassed in some way.
This Update will probably be released in the next weeks for all Operating Systems. So brace yourself if your PC is already slow and you see it becoming even slower.
