[UPDATE 5: Intel's Spectre-focused BIOS updates causing crashes] Intel CPUs vulnerable

Microsoft pauses Meltdown and Spectre patch for AMD machines

"Blue screen crashes on decade old AMD chips seem to be widespread."
—Ars Technica

Yes, I saw this in the news this morning. Sarno reported it before the media outlets, however.

Thank you for giving us warnings.

Happy to help!

Apparently these are the affected processors;

• AMD Sempron 3200+
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+

Found an interesting article about who discovered these vulnerabilities and how.

Not particularly informative about the vulnerabilities themselves, but a good read imo.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-08/-it-can-t-be-true-inside-the-semiconductor-industry-s-meltdown

I am getting some weird performance hitches in a few games, and the root of the cause appears to be an I/O related bottleneck. This is on an SSD. This didn't happen as of a couple weeks ago. I'm getting these hitches occasionally in many open world games, and these are games that used to run flawless.

Yep - there’s benchmarks showing that SSDs have suffered.

Meltdown is a bug where user-run programs can access protected kernel memory. Software updates aimed at preventing this add security measures so that the CPU gets rid of certain information when programs make calls to the OS. Programs use such a call to access files.

These games run a little worse for me than before:

- Witcher 3
- Fallout 4
- Nioh
- Nier Automata (this game had an I/O issue already present, and it's worse now)

Nier used to get frame timing spikes that were I/O related, but they were usually limited to 20-25ms spikes, tested the game again and I was getting 50-100ms frame timing spikes from the I/O, and 50ms+ frame timings are hard stutters. The game is pretty much unplayable. Maybe other people aren't as sensitive to this as I am, but I can't play a game that has a 50ms+ frame timing spike every 20-30 seconds just moving around a map. I call that unplayable according to my personal standards. This game was family shared, but like if a game had performance issues like this and I just bought it, I'd 100% request a refund, and drop a 'thumbs down' on my way out pointing out that the game runs like shit. As I've done quite a few times on steam, already.

"Intel has issued a statement confirming that BIOS patches for the Spectre vulnerability are causing crashes on Broadwell and Haswell systems. Intel didn’t specifically say if Broadwell-E (Core i7 6000 series on desktop) are also affected. The issues have been reported in both data centers and regular user systems."

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-spectre-bios-crash-broadwell-haswell,36324.html

Poe for me is now working like 1 year ago before all the performances fix. Net impact on my FPS :/

I have also noticed an impact on my fps in PoE :( I get about half the performance I used to around abysses with monsters all around it. Not good.....