“Aren't Intel CPUs vulnerable to meltdown and specter? How much does the patching slow it down? Is there even any patches actually available?”
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Yes, this generation of Intel is still vulnerable to those issues - but... At this point I've upgraded two 5th, four 6th, and an 8th Generation processor to the patch for Specter and Meltdown. I benchmarked them all again after the patches. Only one showed any slowdown and it was <3% (a MacBook Pro oddly enough). Four of them actually benchmarked slightly better (probably due to regular microcode improvements that Intel pushes out). The Gen 9 and Gen 10 processors are supposed to have hardware fixes for the vulnerabilities but they are as much as a year out right now. If you need a new PC now don't worry about it. Just do the regular updates. Besides, 70% of security failures are social engineering attacks anyway (human error in being conned into opening malicious files). Your best security is your own brain and good sense. FYI - AMD has it's own - similar - vulnerability issues as well.
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