A new report suggests that Microsoft Defender has a bug which is causing it to hog the CPU resources on a system using an Intel processor, leading to reduced performance. AMD is apparently unaffected.
AV-Comparatives, an anti-malware assessment company, published a report back in May regarding the performance impact that anti-virus programs can have on a system. In its report, AV-Comparatives found that Microsoft Defender was one of the worst system hoggers and as such, it was only able to secure the « STANDARD » award in the test. Fellow outlet TechPowerUp (TPU) also discovered something similar but more digging has revealed that the performance impact may have to do with a bug in Defender which adversely affects Intel processors while AMD CPUs seem to be unaffected. TPU found that the MsMpEng exe file, which is the anti-malware service process for Microsoft Defender, eats up Intel CPU cycles, thus affecting the performance.
