The IT world was caught by surprise this week when it was disclosed that nearly every processor sold in the last 20+ years powering all forms of computers could be exploited due to two major hardware flaws (read our 'what you need to know' article). Discovered last year by Google's Project Zero team, manufacturers have been investigating and working on a fix for months, although the public just came to know about this now.

Because of the nature of Meltdown and Spectre, the patches have to come at the OS level, and there's a possibility of performance loss. On the upside for consumers, desktop computing and gaming may not be as affected as other intensive tasks more commonly seen in server and database applications.

Based on the information received so far, we know most Intel CPUs are affected, but this issue also extends to select ARM architectures, while AMD appears to be mostly in the clear. There are three variants of the exploit and AMD is vulnerable to the ?Bounds Check Bypass? method but this can be solved via an OS update and should come at an insignificant performance cost. The other two variants reportedly don't impact AMD processors due to differences in their architectural design.