The best mitigations for Spectre v1 will remain developer-focused software techniques that avoid putting sensitive data at risk. And admittedly, I haven’t been expecting Intel (or anyone else) to figure that one out in 2018. Unfortunately these hardware changes won’t mitigate Spectre variant 1. Spectre variant 2 (branch target injection) Intel's Meltdown & Spectre Hardware Mitigations Plans (2018) In both cases the company has mitigated the vulnerabilities through a new partitioning system that improves both process and privilege-level separation, going with a “protective walls” analogy. In the interim we have reached out to Intel about how consumers will be able to identify post-mitigation chips, and while we’re still waiting on a more complete response, Intel has told us that they want to be transparent about the matter.Īs for the hardware changes themselves, it’s important to note that Intel’s changes only mitigate Meltdown (what Intel calls “variant 3”) and Spectre variant 2. So there is a lot of uncertainty here over just what this will entail. Cannon Lake?), or for that matter whether these are even going to be traditional consumer chips or just the Core HEDT releases of Cascade Lake. ![]() ![]() While Intel hasn’t shared the complete text of their announcement with us ahead of press time, their specific wording is that the changes will be included in 8 th gen Core processors “expected to ship in the second half of 2018.” Intel hasn’t said what processor family these are (e.g. Meanwhile for updating Intel’s consumer chips, this is a bit more nebulous. Given that virtual machine hosts were among those at the greatest risk here – and more impacted by the performance regressions of the software Meltdown mitigations – this is understandably most crucial market for Intel to address. Little official information is available about Cascade Lake, but importantly for datacenter vendors, this lays out a clear timetable for when they can expect to have access to Meltdown and Spectre-hardened silicon for use in new virtual machine servers. Both the next version of Intel’s Xeon server/HEDT platform – Cascade Lake – as well as new 8 th gen Core processors set to ship in the second half of this year will include the mitigations.įor those not up to date with their Intel codenames, Cascade Lake is the 14nm refresh of Intel’s current Skylake-E/X family. Intel is announcing that they have developed hardware fixes for both the Meltdown and Spectre v2 vulnerabilities, which in turn will be implemented into future processors. Jumping straight to what AnandTech readers will consider the biggest news, Intel is finally talking a bit about future hardware. ![]() However in recent weeks the company finally seems to be turning a corner on their most pressing issues, and this morning is releasing a more forward-looking update to their security issues. Since then the company has been making progress, albeit not without some significant steps backwards such as faulty microcode updates. Since the public revelation of the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities early this year, Intel has spent virtually the entire time in a reactionary mode, starting from the moment the vulnerabilities were revealed ahead of schedule.
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