[News] Intel Processors to Have "In-silicon" Fixes to Meltdown and Spectre This Year

[StyM]

https://www.techpowerup.com/240960/i...ctre-this-year

Intel, which benefited from the post-Q4 public-disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in its latest results, is hoping to mitigate its fallout on Q1-2018. The company, along with several other CPU designers, such as AMD and ARM, are firefighting the two devastating security vulnerabilities through OS kernel patches and CPU micro-code updates; which come at a slight expense of performance. In a bid to unnerve investors, company CEO Brian Krzanich announced that Intel is working on "in-silicon" fixes to Meltdown and Spectre.

An "in-silicon" fix would entail a major CPU micro-architecture design that's inherently immune to the two vulnerabilities and yet offers the benefits of modern branch-prediction and speculative execution. Krzanich says processors with in-silicon fixes to the two vulnerabilities will be released to market by the end of 2018.

[bluestang]

So "In-silicon" bugs and errors too LOL

[iddqd]

Honestly, we should just stop letting the OS manage memory - it can be done much faster and more securely in hardware. Which is cheap these days; there's no need to use your CPU for everything.

e: It's unclear what they mean by in-silicon fix. Are processors just going to ship with microcode that has the workaround? Or have they secretly been working on a clean-sheet uArch that they're going to unveil this year?

[[XC] Lead Head]

So much for Intel's claims about these things being "normal".

[drmrlordx]

Are processors just going to ship with microcode that has the workaround? Or have they secretly been working on a clean-sheet uArch that they're going to unveil this year?

Clean-sheet redesign would take too long. They have nothing slated to arrive on the desktop (-S) chips by the end of 2018, and IceLake which is their 2019 desktop design is too far along in development for them to delay it like that again.

We may see IceLake in mobile this year, but again . . . too far along.

We will see Whiskey Lake in lappies and Cascade Lake in server sockets by the end of the year . . . supposedly. See above.

Realistically Intel's first design that could truly fix Spectre/Meltdown in hardware will be Sapphire Rapids in 2020. Some are projecting 2021.

Anyway, expect to see Intel ship devices this year and in 2019 with firmware/microcode fixes installed by default.

[iddqd]

they leave some unconnected logic gates with no metal above them so they can be wired up however you want in case they want to do a small fix in the upper metal layers only; but I seriously doubt you could fix this with a minor tweak like that.