![]() While far from exhaustive, these hardware fixes were a welcome announcement from Intel considering it had previously slated the 10nm Ice Lake CPU line as the first to receive hardware mitigation for speculative execution vulnerabilities. That launch also coincided with the release of software and microcode fixes for other variants of Spectre. The first hardware fixes Intel implemented against Spectre and its ilk - including variant three, otherwise known as Meltdown - came with the launch of its eighth-generation Whiskey Lake “U-Series.” Those were low-power chips aimed squarely at the laptop market, but Intel followed up with the same hardware-level fixes in its desktop-targeted ninth-generation Coffee Lake R CPUs. Ice Lake CPUs were slated as the first to receive hardware mitigation for speculative execution vulnerabilities. He went on to highlight that many manufacturers of commercial products, like his own Microsoft-made Surface Pro, specifically avoid implementing some of these fixes because of how impactful they are on performance. “The microcode patches that were put out had a fairly significant performance impact because they were disabling pieces of hardware and changing things in ways that weren’t the intent when the chip was designed,” Rambus senior technology advisor, Paul Kocher explained to Digital Trends. These changes weren’t particularly well received because of their impact on performance. The earliest fixes Intel implemented against Spectre and its variants were microcode tweaks which appeared throughout the first half of 2018. In fact, these kinds of problems may never be truly thwarted. ![]() ![]() With Intel so quiet about what’s coming with its next generation of Ice Lake CPUs though, it may be that we’re far from a permanent fix. With so many CPUs from the past decade relying on branch prediction to enhance performance each generation, many believe that only fundamental hardware changes inside the most popular CPUs from the likes of Intel will ward off these bugs forever. It wants to focus on the exciting performance gains made by new generations of chips. In 2019, the company just wants to move on.
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