Microsoft’s Security Updates To Slow Down PCs, Servers

Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday that software updates released to defend against microchip security threats slowed down some personal computers and servers, with systems running on older Intel processors seeing a noticeable decrease in performance.

The comments in a blog post were the clearest signal from Microsoft that fixes for flaws in microchips from Intel and rivals described last week could significantly cut down performance. The topic is of keen interest to large data center operators, which could suffer significant cost increases if computers slow down.

Microsoft’s statement suggests slowdowns could be more substantial than Intel previously indicated. While Intel Chief Executive Officer Brian Krzanich on Monday said the problem may be more pervasive than first thought, he didn’t discuss the degree of impact -- only that some machines would be more affected than others.

Later on Tuesday Intel offered new details on PC performance impacts because of security updates.

"Based on our most recent PC benchmarking, we continue to expect that the performance impact should not be significant for average computer users. 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 a statement. The testing on PCs with the latest Intel silicon found an impact of 6 percent or less, the company said.

PCs running Windows 10 and sold since 2016 will face slowdowns of less than 10 percent, which Microsoft said will probably not be noticeable to users. Customers with older Windows 10 PCs will notice some slowness because those machines contain older chips. Machines running Windows 7 and Windows 8 from 2015 or earlier will be the most affected with users noticing a decrease in system performance, Microsoft said.

On Jan. 3, Intel confirmed its chips contain a long-standing feature that makes them vulnerable to hacking. There are two main flaws, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, and one or both are present in almost all of the billions of processors that run personal computers, servers and phones and could give attackers unauthorized access to data.

The world’s largest technology companies are releasing software updates to patch these security holes, and there’s been intense debate about how much this will affect performance.

The increasingly dire assessments of the problem mean some customers will have to accept worsening computer performance in the name of security, forcing them to add more servers to get back to where they were before applying the security updates. It also shows the challenge of updating such widespread hardware flaws.

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