Your PC has been slower ever since Microsoft patched the Spectre flaws back in January 2018. PCs from 2015 and earlier slowed down the most. Now, Windows 10’s next update will mostly eliminate those slowdowns, making your PC faster.
Microsoft’s fix is part of Windows 10 version 19H1, which is currently in development. Windows Insiders can install an early, unstable version of it now. Microsoft will likely release it to every Windows 10 user around April 2019.
This information comes via Microsoft’s Mehmet Iyigun, who works on the Windows kernel team. On Twitter, he explained the Microsoft has now enabled “retpoline” and “import optimization” by default in the new builds of Windows 10. Together, these features “reduce the [performance] impact… to noise-level for most scenarios.” That’s another way of saying the slowdown will largely eliminated and basically unnoticeable.
Here’s his full tweet:
Yes, we have enabled retpoline by default in our 19H1 flights along with what we call "import optimization" to further reduce perf impact due to indirect calls in kernel-mode. Combined, these reduce the perf impact of Spectre v2 mitigations to noise-level for most scenarios. https://t.co/CPlYeryV9K
— Mehmet Iyigun (@mamyun) October 18, 2018
We’re not sure what Microsoft’s “import optimization” is, but retpoline has been used on some Linux systems since January 2018. Retpoline was developed by Google and is a faster way of blocking Spectre-based attacks with “negligible impact on performance,” according to Google. You can get all the technical details about Retpoline on Google’s website.
It’s notable that security researcher Alex Ionescu found the speed of transferring a bunch of small files was improved on his test system. That’s because some benchmarks found a slowdown of up to 23% when moving a bunch of smaller files around, but Microsoft’s new patch seems to help a lot here.
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Source: How-To Geek
