In response to meltdown/spectre side-channel vulnerabilities, which are based on fine grained observation of the CPU to infer cache state of an adjacent process or VM, a mitigration response by browsers was the reduction of the time resolution of various time apis, especially in javascript.

The authors responded with alternative sources of finding fine grained timing, available to browsers. An interpolation method allows obtaining of a fine resolution of 15 μs, from a timer that is rounded down to multiples of 100 ms.

The javascript  high resolution time api is still widely available and described at https://www.w3.org/TR/hr-time/ with a reference to previous work on cache attacks in Practical cache attacks in JS

A meltdown PoC is at https://github.com/gkaindl/meltdown-poc, to test the timing attack in its own process. The instruction RDTSC returns the Time Stamp Counter (TSC), a 64-bit register that counts the number of cycles since reset, and so has a resolution of 0.5ns on a 2GHz CPU.

int main() {
 unsigned long i;
 i = __rdtsc();
 printf("%lld\n", i);
}