It is anticipated that on January 10th, 2018, customers using Intel Processors could suffer a potential decrease in performance of up to 30 percent on all systems. This is solely a hardware issue coming from Intel systems, and will affect users on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
There is a design flaw in Intel's processor chips that has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to correct a chip-level security bug. The anticipation is that Windows systems will undergo maintenance and reboots on January 10, presumably to roll out the bug fixes. Unfortunately, these updates to both Linux and Windows may incur a performance decrease on Intel products. This can slow down system performance by up to 30 percent, depending on the task and the processor model. The bug will also impact big-name cloud computing environments, including Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.
These patches coming out could impact the performance of development, staging, and production environments, and will need to be taken into consideration by infrastructure teams.
References
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42561169
https://spectreattack.com/
