https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xw4vak/relax-the-meltdown-and-spectre-cpu-patches-arent-messing-with-your-frame-rates

Doom came to the CPU market last week as security researchers at Google Project Zero, Technical University of Graz, and Cerberus Security told the world of Spectre and Meltdown—apocalyptic sounding vulnerabilities in almost all the world’s processors.

The pair of exploits piggyback on the fundamental architecture of most modern CPUs. Most modern operating systems have a kernel that does the mediating between the operating system and the rest of the machine. The exploits take advantage of some clever engineering most chips use to speed up communication between the kernel and the OS. Readers can find a more in-depth description of the problem here.