Lazy FP state flaw is the latest to hit Intel Core processors

[HEXUS]

Modern OSes will have already been patched, and AMD systems are immune.

Read more.

[Tabbykatze]

A whole bag of worms were opened when that gentleman found the original flaw!

[YazX]

now its like "oh, Intel....again!" as we are getting used to these stuff.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Has Intel given any dates on when Meltdown/Spectre will be mitigated in hardware,ie,when are the CPUs with such mitigations going to be introduced??

[3dcandy]

I've not seen any firm dates yet. Mind you not been looking as other flaws will be found...

[philehidiot]

I really don't think hackers want to be swiping what I'm looking at on an evening.

Poor things will be traumatised for life.

[3dcandy]

Drive by porn attack - sounds like a real z list movie that

[3dcandy]

It really shows by the lack of comments on this how already people have begun to become immune to yet another flaw

[DDY]

It really shows by the lack of comments on this how already people have begun to become immune to yet another flaw

What reaction was you expecting?

[3dcandy]

A bit more than we have had...
Just shows that people are more worried about a notch in a smartphone screen

[kompukare]

Has Intel given any dates on when Meltdown/Spectre will be mitigated in hardware,ie,when are the CPUs with such mitigations going to be introduced??

Rather suspect that their promise to ship some 'fixed' CPUs in 2018 refers only to microcode or a similar easy fixes. New CPU with the updates by default or a chipset where the BIOS has the microcode updates by default?

Meets their promise to ship 'fixed' CPUs in 2018, but certainly not what people were expecting. And of course, those microcode updates will still have the performance hit.

As for CPUs with proper hardware fixed? Well they've known about some of these exploits for about a year now which isn't enough for any major architectural changes. And the logic for out-of-order speculative execution and branch prediction are amongst the most complex part of modern CPU designs and even adding the security checks we had all assumed were there already will take a lot of time and should need a fair bit of validation too. Maybe 3 years from July 2017?

[DanceswithUnix]

Maybe 3 years from July 2017?

That seems pessimistic.

New CPU designs get validated, then the failures are evaluated and bug fixes applied to the bits that seem worth fixing and some bits just get disabled if that is deemed the best way forward. But bug fixes do get applied, revised steppings are made, so I would hope their next CPU release will contain something to help.

The big question here is whether Intel can work out how to fix this in a way that is better than the BIOS update. That is the bar, from where we are now not from before the news of Meltdown broke. The longer Intel leave it, the higher the expectation on how close to perfection the fix will be.