Relax: Intel says 90% of Intel PCs produced in the last 5 years will be protected by the end of the week

In what will hopefully turn out to be a storm in a teacup, Intel has said the processor vulnerability which affects their chips and which would allow in some circumstances websites to read all your passwords from your browser’s password manager, for example, will be patched for 90% of Intel chipsets produced in the last  5 years by the end of the week, leaving users 100% protected.

The system updates should be pushed out by Microsoft and those annoying PC management apps that live in your system tray and Intel claims that users should in most cases not be concerned about performance impact, saying:

Intel continues to believe that the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time. While on some discrete workloads the performance impact from the software updates may initially be higher, additional post-deployment identification, testing and improvement of the software updates should mitigate that impact.

Intel encourages computer users worldwide to utilize the automatic update functions of their operating systems and other computer software to ensure their systems are up-to-date.

via The Verge