Intel users who are regular consumers need not fear much from the recent security fix for the central processing unit (CPU) meltdown, as benchmarks (performance tests) have proven that gaming and other average user applications are not affected by the performance impact of the update.
Extensive CPU benchmarks from a website called Techspot have confirmed that the negative performance impact from the said security fix for CPUs only crippled server and cloud performance of processors. Gamers and multimedia professionals (video editors, digital artists) need not fret too much for the performance of their CPUs.
The benchmarks from Techspot incorporated a pre-patch and post-patch methodology which tested the performance of the Coffee Lake CPUs from Intel before and after the Microsoft security update was implemented. Said update for the Intel CPUs were initially reported to have as much as a 30 percent performance impact on CPUs though Intel also mentioned that regular user applications would not be affected, and this seemed to be true.
Techspot's benchmarks included games like "Ashes of the Singularity," "Assassin's Creed: Origins," and "Battlefield 1," all CPU-intensive games, and none displayed performance hobbling post-patch. This confirms that games are largely unaffected by the security update.
Meanwhile, professional applications like VeraCrypt, Microsoft Excel 2016, 7-Zip, Blender, and synthetic benchmarking tool Cinebench R15 show little to no performance discrepancies pre-patch and post-patch for the Intel CPUs. This also means that most office applications and software are largely unaffected by the Microsoft security update for Intel CPUs.
What did affect the Intel CPUs are the 16K read and write performance of the CPU for ATTO disk benchmarks, and significantly so. This means that when handling large quantities of digital content from storage to storage, Intel CPUs tend to suffer from the security patch, hence the negative impact to servers and cloud storages, which are mainly used for online applications and online video games.
Intel owners should keep in mind that the tests were only for 8th-generation Coffee Lake processors, and while older generations of Intel Core processors might show some difference, Techspot's spokesperson from its Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel has stated that there shouldn't be many issues as well with them. Rest assured, most Intel users can breathe easy knowing that their Intel CPUs are still capable of doing their advertised capabilities.
