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AMD Is Releasing Spectre Firmware Updates To Fix CPU Vulnerabilities (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AMD's initial response to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws made it clear "there is a near zero risk to AMD processors." That zero risk doesn't mean zero impact, as we're starting to discover today. "We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat," says Mark Papermaster, AMD's chief technology officer. AMD is making firmware updates available for Ryzen and EPYC owners this week, and the company is planning to update older processors "over the coming weeks." Like Intel, these firmware updates will be provided to PC makers, and it will be up to suppliers to ensure customers receive these. AMD isn't saying whether there will be any performance impacts from applying these firmware updates, nor whether servers using EPYC processors will be greatly impacted or not. AMD is also revealing that its Radeon GPU architecture isn't impacted by Meltdown or Spectre, simply because those GPUs "do not use speculative execution and thus are not susceptible to these threats." AMD says it plans to issue further statements as it continues to develop security updates for its processors.
AMD never said there was a near zero risk for Spectre. AMD is not affected by Meltdown. AMD and Intel affected by Spectre. Period. Stop trying to push Intels problems on AMD.
Also: Spectre: Pretty old news, just somebody made it more practical now.
The only reason Spectre is pushed in the news is that Intel is desperately trying to obscure the magnitude of their screw-up with Meltdown.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I've read so many articles on Meltdown/Spectre and many of them at least get some of it wrong. Even Microsoft and Intel can't agree on this significance of performance slowdowns. I personally think AMD tried to capitalize on this and downplayed their chips exposure to this.
Quite the opposite. Intel conflated Meltdown and Spectre in order to downplay their chips exposure. Meltdown is the Intel-only extreme performance killer, causing the OS to jump through retarded flaming hoops just to stay safe. None of the spectre mitigations impact performance, but hey let's mix it in with Meltdown so it looks like other chipmakers produced shitty chips too, right?
This is an update to microcode which fundamentally modifies the behavior of the instructions within a processor. You could argue that it's just a specific type of firmware but if that's the case then call it by title it's been given! It's not like this is a website for non-technical people.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.