Oh, me? I am so excited about all the computing power that's gonna be stolen from people who had updated their Intel CPUs last month.

I dunno what they're up to but I'm sure it's very exciting. I'm lost between Skynet and a one world government cryptocurrency mining they will use the power for.

What do you think?

Not sure if we're talking about the same patch, but the CPU power wasn't stolen from them.

It was a safety precaution. CPUs for a while now have implemented a feature where it looks ahead and estimates the result of say, an if statement and stores the state for if that guess was right.

Then when the CPU gets up to that point and the guess was right, it could simply swap out it's state with the stored one.

You could think of it as a way to implement multi-threading on a single threaded program.

The problem that was recently discovered, is that programs can time the delay based on if the prediction was true or not. So what this means, is a malicious programmer could execute an if statement and time the delay, and even if they weren't allowed to access that memory or whatever, the program had already looked ahead and done the cache state. This way, they could read sensitive data and so on.

I'm not sure on the exact specifics, but I think this is why Intel removed this feature.

Thank you @coolq, it's a really educational explanation. Instead of deleting my ignorant rant, I will keep it so people like me can learn from it :) Thanks again!

@zeknoss
Something good can come from everything! Thanks for being open minded ;)