[The Exiled]

Intel Publishes Spectre & Meltdown Hardware Plans: Fixed Gear Later This Year

Intel is announcing that they have developed hardware fixes for both the Meltdown and Spectre v2 vulnerabilities, which in turn will be implemented into future processors. Both the next version of Intel’s Xeon server/HEDT platform – Cascade Lake – as well as new 8th gen Core processors set to ship in the second half of this year will include the mitigations. Meanwhile for updating Intel’s consumer chips, this is a bit more nebulous. While Intel hasn’t shared the complete text of their announcement with us ahead of press time, their specific wording is that the changes will be included in 8th gen Core processors “expected to ship in the second half of 2018.” Intel hasn’t said what processor family these are (e.g. Cannon Lake?), or for that matter whether these are even going to be traditional consumer chips or just the Core HEDT releases of Cascade Lake.

As for the hardware changes themselves, it’s important to note that Intel’s changes only mitigate Meltdown (what Intel calls “variant 3”) and Spectre variant 2. In both cases the company has mitigated the vulnerabilities through a new partitioning system that improves both process and privilege-level separation, going with a “protective walls” analogy. Unfortunately these hardware changes won’t mitigate Spectre variant 1. And admittedly, I haven’t been expecting Intel (or anyone else) to figure that one out in 2018. The best mitigations for Spectre v1 will remain developer-focused software techniques such as retpoline.

Izvor: AnandTech