Intel Says 'Partitions' in New Chips Will Correct the Design Flaw that Created Spectre and Meltdown (geekwire.com)

Intel said on Thursday it is introducing hardware protections against the Spectre CPU flaw that was discovered last year. From a report: Starting with the Cascade Lake version of its Xeon server processors later this year, Intel will incorporate "protective walls" in its hardware that prevent malicious hackers from using speculative execution techniques to steal private information from the secure part of the processor. These fixes will also ship with the PC version of the Cascade Lake chips, but the tech industry has been much more concerned about the effect of these design flaws on server processors running in data centers and cloud vendors.

The new fixes allow Intel to still benefit from the performance advantages of speculative execution -- in which a processor guesses which upcoming instructions it will need to execute in order to speed things up -- without the security risks. The hardware changes address Variants 2 and 3 of the Spectre and Meltdown issues first disclosed in early January, and software fixes should continue to address Variant 1, Intel said.

Comments

Aren't we all supposed to be dead by now?

[Seven Spirals]

Where are the weaponized exploits that were going to sweep the internet and the zillion-unpatched-windows hordes? *YAWN* Again, I've gotta kick the news habit. What a hyperventilating waste of time this has been watching IT news and vendors nearly faint.

Failed at that before

[DrYak]

Intel has already failed at exactly that before :

IntelME was supposed to be exactly that: a separated isolated ARC core in the chipset, that was used to handle administrative tasks even if the main x86 CPU was shutdown (IntelAMT - Intel own NIH syndrom "lights out management" vaguely similar to IPMI). Got further repurposed for some trusted security tasks (TPM), got further repurposed for DRM related task, used also for critical steps to bring the hardware up.

And was the target of attacks and exploits last summer. Attacks that thus work EVEN when the main x86 CPU is turned off (remembre, before the overarching list of roles, it began as an IPMI-like solution). To the point that vendors like DELL started offering new BIOS/UEFI firmware, in which the Intel ME code was stripped to the bare strict minimum for just the "bring hardware up" part.

But I'm sure *this time around* the walled secure CPU core that Intel promise will be flawless and never exploited~~