After the shocking news of serious security design bugs in almost all the processors created since the 90s, came the relief that all the operating system companies have released updates to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. The CPU manufacturers have also released guidelines to avoid any problems arising from these vulnerabilities. In the future, they will perhaps release many more software tools to mitigate the effect of these vulnerabilities.
But after installing these software updates in Windows, you may find your system has become a little bit slower. If that is the case, then perhaps you would want to perform a benchmark test on your CPU to see how fast it is working and if the performance has degraded. You can use the ThreadRacer benchmark utility for this.
ThreadRacer is a Windows tool to run a benchmark on your multi-core CPU. It can load the individual cores or threads as selected by you. Depending on your processor, it will show the number of cores or threads available for you. You can select the number of threads to be run under the benchmark. Typically you can choose one thread for each of the available threads on your system. You have to click on Start Selected Threads button to start the benchmark.
You will see how fast the ThreadRacer utility loads all the threads of your CPU with a series of complex calculation iterations. You can see how much of the CPU thread percentage is being used by the ThreadRacer. The rest if being utilized by some other applications or by the operating system itself.
As you can guess from the interface, the ThreadRacer utility can only work with processors having a maximum of eight threads. Some of the newer processors like AMD Ryzen that has 16 threads cannot be tested with this program. Perhaps the developers will release a newer version in the future ti support processors having more than 8 threads.
You can download ThreadRacer CPU benchmark utility from https://bitsum.com/portfolio/threadracer/.