The Effects of the Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities
...these vulnerabilities will affect computers' functionality. In some cases, the patches for Spectre and Meltdown result in significant reductions in speed. The press initially reported 30%, but that only seems true for certain servers running in the cloud. For your personal computer or phone, the performance hit from the patch is minimal. But as more vulnerabilities are discovered in hardware, patches will affect performance in noticeable ways.
And then there are the unpatchable vulnerabilities. For decades, the computer industry has kept things secure by finding vulnerabilities in fielded products and quickly patching them. Now there are cases where that doesn't work. Sometimes it's because computers are in cheap products that don't have a patch mechanism, like many of the DVRs and webcams that are vulnerable to the Mirai (and other) botnets -- groups of Internet-connected devices sabotaged for coordinated digital attacks. Sometimes it's because a computer chip's functionality is so core to a computer's design that patching it effectively means turning the computer off. This, too, is becoming more common....