The reason for this was the Downfall vulnerability.
Intel Corporation experts discovered the vulnerability CVE-2022-40982, known as Downfall, and slowed down the computers of users around the world to fix it. The downfall affects Intel consumer and server processors from the Skylake family to Rocket Lake. Thus, most users of Intel chips found themselves in the face of a hypothetical threat, which is guaranteed not to affect only the owners of the latest models.
As a result, Intel engineers released an update that significantly slowed down the performance of the tech giant’s processors.
Intel has slowed down computers around the world
The reason for such conclusions was the research of specialists of the Phoronix publication, which covers the subject of the Linux OS and software for this environment. Employees of the resource test laboratory conducted tests and compared the performance of the chips. It turned out that the update could reduce the power of computers based on Intel processors by up to 39 percent.
So, during testing of the Xeon Platinum 8380 and Xeon Gold 6226R, performance fell by 6 percent, Cascade Lake – 33 percent, Core i7-1165G7 – from 11 to 39 percent in various tests.
The publication’s specialists concluded that users will have to choose whether to refuse the update that eliminates the vulnerability or install it, but sacrifice speed.
The fact that millions of computers with Intel processors were at risk due to vulnerability, in early August, said Google engineer Daniel Mogimi ( Daniel Moghimi ). According to Mogimi, using the vulnerability, hackers can steal passwords, private messages, encryption keys and other sensitive data.
