Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday the patches released to guard against Meltdown and Spectre security threats slowed down some personal computers and servers, with systems running on older Intel Corp processors seeing a noticeable decrease in performance. That's a contrary message than the one that Intel's CEO delivered last night during his keynote at CES 2018. He began his keynote around the 1 hour mark of the video below.  

He completely downplayed the problem and put up a slide as noted below where industry leaders were all in sync to say all was fine and dandy.

The Reuters report further noted that "The security updates also froze some computers running AMD chipsets, Microsoft said in a blog post, citing customer complaints.

Shares in Intel, which reiterated on Tuesday that it saw no sign of significant slowdown in computers, fell 1.4 percent, while those of AMD fell nearly 4 percent.

AMD shares have gained nearly 20 percent in the last week as investors speculated that the chipmaker could wrest market share from Intel, whose chips were most exposed to the security flaws.

Microsoft executive Terry Myerson wrote in a blog post, that "We (and others in the industry) had learned of this vulnerability under nondisclosure agreement several months ago and immediately began developing engineering mitigations and updating our cloud infrastructure."

On Tuesday AMD said it was aware of an issue with some older-generation processors following the installation of a Microsoft security update that was published over the weekend. Microsoft said it was working with AMD to resolve the issues.

Earlier today Intel offered another security issue update here.

At the end of the day, the tech industry is getting hammered with bad news to kick start 2018. Apple now has 30 class actions against them to date over purposely slowing down iPhones while class actions have started against Intel over the security chip flaws known as Meltdown and Spectre with at least 5 to date.

With Microsoft admitting that older PC's are being hit hard, you have to wonder if Wintel users will want to upgrade any time soon knowing of this issue. Even with a patch, who wants to instantly inherit this flaw even with patches?

Some Intel and Apple fans see this as a plot to push hardware sales and the Wintel supply chain is worried if these revelations could hurt PC sales just as they were beginning to pick up after years of straight declines.

A DigiTimes report published today titled "PC supply chain bracing for Intel bug impact on demand" noted that "PC brand vendors have pointed out that the CPU giant had several meetings with them at the end of 2017 discussing how to resolve the problem, but failed to come to a conclusion."

The report added that market watchers also noted that the extent of harm done by the security issue to PC demand remains unknown and still needs to be monitored to see if it could undermine vendors' PC shipments during the whole first-half 2018.

Stay tuned, because this story just keeps on ticking.

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