Intel CEO Brian Krzanich at the IDF developer conference in 2016. The company said Tuesday that fixes for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were causing slowdowns of 6 percent or less.
Stephen Shankland/CNETIntel said Tuesday that patches to its central processing units are slowing things down by 6 percent or less. The patches fix the Spectre and Meltdown flaws that make the chips susceptible to attacks from hackers.
“Based on our most recent PC benchmarking, we continue to expect that the performance impact should not be significant for average computer users,” the company said in a press release.
Intel has fought the idea that patching the flaws will cause major slowdowns on the systems its chips are running. That’s a challenge because the processors were made vulnerable by a feature called speculative execution, which was meant to boost chip performance. Intel, along with fellow chipmakers AMD and ARM, has to come up with ways to continue reaping the benefits of that feature while making the chips more secure.
Intel has said that any hits to performance will only take place when a device takes on specific tasks, and regular use of the computer won’t be affected. In its press release Tuesday, the company said its testing of patched chips shows they were correct.
“This means the typical home and business PC user should not see significant slowdowns in common tasks such as reading email, writing a document or accessing digital photos,” Intel said in its update.
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