By Next Week, Intel Expects To Issue Updates To More Than 90% of Processor Products Introduced Within Past Five Years (intel.com)

Intel said on Thursday that by next week it expects to have patched 90 percent of its processors that it released within the last five years, making PCs and servers "immune" from both the Spectre and Meltdown exploits. The company adds: Intel has already issued updates for the majority of processor products introduced within the past five years. By the end of next week, Intel expects to have issued updates for more than 90 percent of processor products introduced within the past five years. In addition, many operating system vendors, public cloud service providers, device manufacturers and others have indicated that they have already updated their products and services.

Intel continues to believe that the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time. While on some discrete workloads the performance impact from the software updates may initially be higher, additional post-deployment identification, testing and improvement of the software updates should mitigate that impact. System updates are made available by system manufacturers, operating system providers and others.

Comments

Intels updates also slow down AMD chips that don't

[Joe_Dragon]

Intels updates also slow down AMD chips that don't have the bug as well. And AMD had to come out with there own update to back off the big slow down fix that Intel patch

Re:class action time!

[Kohath]

You'll get a $2 off coupon for a new CPU. $100 million for the lawyers

Re: 5 Years?

[networkBoy]

there is a technical issue here too...
We switched source repositories from ClearCase to Perforce around 5 years ago...
I think that while you're right that EOL shouldn't be an excuse, there may be serious issues to resurrecting the older codebase...
hence why I suggested similar spec new CPUs and MBs at cost as an option.

Re:Microcode update?

[higuita]

the fix will mitigate the threat... for the intel, the fix will clear the cache after any jump between kernel and userland, so it gives a big performance hit when that happen... there is no microcode that can solve this, its the hardware design in the intel that is broken, it only check if the branch is invalid AFTER loading it.
AMD is immune to the meltdown because the hardware detects the invalid branch BEFORE loading it

So without hardware change from intel, you will either have the full performance, but insecure system, or a secure system, but a big performance loss.

They may want to optimize, by avoiding the cache cleanup in some situations... but i'm not seeing any and if they exist, should be corner cases

Re:Intels updates also slow down AMD chips that do

[The Cynical Critic]

A further thing to keep in mind: Spectre, the less serious but more widespread vulnerability, is most serious on Intel. In Google's tests using 3 proof-of-concept variants, one non-malicious and two non-malicious, only the non-malicious one worked universally while the malicious ones only worked problem free on Intel. One of the malicious ones did work on one of the two tested AMD parts, but only in a non-default configuration (while Intel was vulnerable in the default configuration as well).

Re: Intels updates also slow down AMD chips that d

[squiggleslash]

From what I can figure out, Spectre can only be mitigated against, it can't be eliminated without hardware design philosophy changes. It'll be very interesting to see the consequences of that.