It's very early but initial reports seem to be actually fairly minimal for most users based on win 10 tests with an i7-8700:
https://www.techspot.com/article/1554-m ... e-windows/Personally, still a little wary of how it may effect further os + chip types - especially win7 + dual socket machines, but I'm going to be in the minority there... tbh it *seems* the hits are to be on data transfer and the management between servers/virtual computer setups... So the bad news seems to fairly limited for most people assuming you're not right up against some kind of hardware borderline for say streaming/recording high def video, or disk reads on high res assets for open world games.
Upshot: Although there are situations where drastic losses around 30% are evident, most practical desktop user performance hits *seem* around just 1% or so.
BuckoA51 wrote:
By the time processors arrive with both of these bugs completely fixed, it's likely they will need new motherboards too.
Whilst meltdown maybe fixed with hardware re-designs (I wouldn't expect that within a year from intel... but who knows if they've been on this for 6 months now), I don't think anyone is going to change OS + hardware architecture to combat spectre within the foreseeable future; I think you'll just see an uptick in business for those patching against possible exploits. Although who knows this could speed up a real shakeup in what we understand as 'pc' architecture in the next couple of years; especially anything that shares a lineage at either end of the scale - [rapidly iterated] mobile processing or [now looking for other options, with a few large scale models already available] server processing.... but still ... I wouldn't hold my breath on this front...