Your Intel-powered PC might not be running at full speed right now, and you can blame Windows Defender, the anti-malware tool that is preinstalled on your system. A bug, discovered by TechPowerUp associate software author Kevin Glynn, causes Windows Defender to “randomly start using all seven hardware performance counters provided by Intel Core processors.” A utility Glynn created that monitors and logs performance counters on Intel Core CPUs since 2008 found that the strange behavior results in significantly reduced performance.
The first sign that something is happening is that HWiNFO will be reporting a reduced “Effective Clock” speed when the CPU is fully loaded. A much bigger problem is that when Defender is affected by the bug, performance of your machine will be significantly reduced. For example, a Core i9-10850K running at 5.00 GHz all-core loses 1000 Cinebench points (or 6%). Such a performance loss has been reported by owners of Intel Core 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th Gen, both desktop and mobile CPUs, on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. AMD processors are not affected.
To be clear, this is not an issue with Intel processors, because manually overriding the counters and resetting them returns a system to normal performance. There is no way to prevent Windows Defender from harassing your Intel processor unless you download third-party software. You probably won’t even know your CPU is being bogged down unless you’re actively monitoring its performance.
Stay putt in our subsequent posts On how to fix this bug from slowing down your Intel CPU.
Story Credits :Gizmodo
