The specter of Spectre still looms above Intel, which just today disclosed a new variant of that most dire of chip flaws. It’s issuing a mitigation patch in tandem with the announcement that may come with a serious performance hit — which is why it will be off by default.
View More Intel discloses a new Spectre exploit variant, but leaves mitigation off by defaultCategory: meltdown-spectre
Last march of the Penryns: Intel cuts Spectre fixes for some older chips
As part of its ongoing efforts to patch its systems against the Meltdown and Spectre chip flaws, Intel indicated last month that it would be issuing fixes as far back as 2005’s Yorkfield processors. But in a new guidance document the company announces that many of these older platforms will not receive fixes after all.
View More Last march of the Penryns: Intel cuts Spectre fixes for some older chipsIntel announces hardware fixes for Spectre and Meltdown on upcoming chips
When the Spectre and Meltdown bugs hit, it became clear that they wouldn’t be fixed with a few quick patches — the problem runs deeper than that. Fortunately, Intel has had plenty of time to work on it, and new chips coming out later this year will include improvements at the hardware/architecture level that protect against the flaws. Well, two out of three, anyway.
View More Intel announces hardware fixes for Spectre and Meltdown on upcoming chipsIntel ships update for newest Spectre-affected chips
Intel has announced that the fix is out for its latest chips affected by Spectre, the memory-leakage flaw affecting practically all computing hardware. The patch is for the Skylake generation (late 2015) and newer, though most users will still ha…
View More Intel ships update for newest Spectre-affected chipsIntel does its best to tamp down impact of Spectre and Meltdown in earnings call
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich was delighted to report that Intel had a record year in the company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts yesterday. Of course, he also had to acknowledge the Spectre and Meltdown chip vulnerabilities revealed earlier this month in perhaps the ultimate good news-bad news moment. Like any good salesman, Krzanich led with the good news. “2017 was a record… Read More
Apple issues Meltdown fix for Macs running Sierra and El Capitan
A wise person once said, “don’t upgrade to the latest OS X until it’s been patched a few times. And even then, sometimes it isn’t really worth it.” These words have inspired many to stay on older versions of the OS, though lately that meant remaining vulnerable to Meltdown while those on the latest version were protected. Fortunately Apple has brought old OSes… Read More
Linus Torvalds declares Intel fix for Meltdown/Spectre ‘complete and utter garbage’
The always outspoken Linus Torvalds, best known for his continuing work on the innermost code of Linux systems, has harsh words to say and accusations to level against Intel. His evaluation of Intel’s latest proposed fix for the Meltdown/Spectre issue: “the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.” Read More
ARM’s CEO Simon Segars on Spectre/Meltdown, IoT security and more
This year’s CES happened in the shadow of the Spectre and Meltdown disclosures, and virtually every conversation at the show turned to this topic at some point. Because this was CES, we had the ability to talk to quite a few people who are close to this issue, including ARM CEO Simon Segars, who stopped by to talk about security and these recent disclosures and their mitigations. Read More
Intel is having reboot issues with its Spectre-Meltdown patches
It hasn’t been a fun time to be Intel. Last week the company revealed two chip vulnerabilities that have come to be known as Spectre and Meltdown and have been rocking the entire chip industry ever since. This week the company issued some patches to rectify the problem. Today, word leaked that some companies were having a reboot issue after installing them. A bad week just got worse. Read More
Intel tried desperately to change the subject from Spectre and Meltdown at CES
Intel had a bad week last week. It was so bad that the chip maker has to be thrilled to have CES, the massive consumer technology show going on this week in Las Vegas, as a way to change the subject and focus on the other work they are doing. Rea…
View More Intel tried desperately to change the subject from Spectre and Meltdown at CESGoogle claims its Spectre and Meltdown mitigation results in no performance degradation
It’s been a long week since we first learned about the now infamous Spectre and Meltdown chip vulnerabilities. One of the issues with mitigating the danger these vulnerabilities pose is that they could result in serious performance degradation. In a blog post today, Google claimed their solutions resulted in no performance degradation across the different mitigation techniques they… Read More
Intel details performance hit for Meltdown fix on affected processors
Now that the Meltdown and Spectre cats are out of the bag and patches are being issued left and right, the main question people have is: will this affect my everyday work? Intel’s latest performance metrics suggest that yes it might, but not too much — more so if, like me, you have an older processor. Read More