Intel is attempting to patch Spectre again with the rollout of patches for Kaby Lake-, Coffee Lake-, and Skylake-based platforms. The updates will cover the organization’s sixth, seventh, and eighth-generation Intel Core product lines, and also the X-series processor family. The Xeon Scalable and Intel Xeon D processors for data center systems will likewise be protected. The updates will be issued through OEM firmware pushes.
Intel beforehand issued a patch to address Spectre, however then needed to advise users to stop deploying the fix because it sometimes caused computers to immediately reboot. At the time, executive vice president Navin Shenoy recommended users skip the patches until a better version could be deployed, which seems, by all accounts, to be the fix declared. Shenoy writes that this new patch has been widely tested.
All things considered, this patch comes about two months after the CPU flaws were first exposed publicly and almost nine months after they were first reported to Intel. The organization initially played the flaws off as nothing major, saying that, “for the average computer user, [they] should not be significant and [would] be mitigated over time.” It likewise guaranteed a patch within a week of the Spectre and Meltdown being publicly disclosed.
Indeed, even with its chill tone and extra lead time, the organization has struggled to adequately address the issue. Regardless it isn’t fiercely sounding the alarm now, however it’s getting obvious that the organization minimized its struggles to fix the flaws.