My concern was with Speculative Execution in the Folding software, if the CPU Firmware was modified to eliminate those instructions or modify their behavior, would that reduce the performance of the Client by some degree?
That's precisely the concern I was addressing in post 4600.
Because the lion's share of your processing happens in the GPUs, what's going on in
the CPU is of vanishingly small consequence. There may be a measurable hit, but it shouldn't be anywhere near the 6% figure. I'd imagine that the results uploads (one of the steps where privileges come into play) happens asynchronously (as a separate and independent process that isn't going to stall FAH processing).
Even for those not using significant GPU power, the impact probably won't be all that important as the grinding typically doesn't require elevated privileges other than memory allocations.
Either way, the mitigation
is NOT going to impact you if you don't do a Windows update. Perhaps not obviously, this is NOT an option for users of Windows 10.