Published Oct 27, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT

His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.

Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.

It's rare that a security vulnerability affects a huge swath of processors all at once, but the Spectre vulnerabilities that were uncovered in 2018 were so widespread that they forced operating system vendors to trade performance for protection. Windows started carrying mitigations to protect against it that were on by default, and it did take sacrificing some CPU performance .…