[tomek@vz]

Intel has spent much of its goodwill with customers chasing down bugs: the Spectre and Meltdown bugs it dealt with years ago, as well as the instability that plagued its Raptor Lake processors last year. Now there are additional chapters in each of those stories.

You don’t have to do anything — just make sure your PC is patched and up to date. But there will be a price to pay in performance in fixing the latest issue, and one you can’t really do anything about.

On May 1, Intel issued yet another microcode update for the Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors. Those processors could degrade over time due to elevated operating voltages, Intel said last July. But the recent update was designed to prevent instability on systems “running multiple days with low-activity and lightly-threaded workloads” — or machines that weren’t working at their full capacity.

> PcWorld