Intel's upcoming 8th-generation 'Cascade Lake' processors will have built-in Spectre patches

Polycount

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Intel has been the source of quite a bit of controversy lately following the discovery of two major security flaws within their processors. For the unaware, these flaws, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, allow hackers to take advantage of "speculative execution" to swipe personal data from a victim's machine.

Though these flaws exist within AMD's processors as well, Intel's chips have been the most vulnerable. As such, Intel has been working closely with other tech companies to roll out software patches for known Meltdown and Spectre variants. The patches released so far have been effective but they've also come at the cost of system performance.

Fortunately, that may not be the case in the future. In a blog post, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced the company's intentions to "[advance] security at the silicon level" by ensuring their upcoming 8th-generation "Xeon Scalable" processors -- codenamed "Cascade Lake" -- won't be as vulnerable to Spectre variants upon release. The following excerpt details how Krzanich intends to accomplish his company's goals:

...I also want to take the opportunity to share more details of what we are doing at the hardware level to protect against these vulnerabilities in the future. This was something I committed to during our most recent earnings call.

While Variant 1 will continue to be addressed via software mitigations, we are making changes to our hardware design to further address the other two. We have redesigned parts of the processor to introduce new levels of protection through partitioning that will protect against both Variants 2 and 3. Think of this partitioning as additional “protective walls” between applications and user privilege levels to create an obstacle for bad actors.

Whether or not this "obstacle" will completely stop hackers from taking advantage of the exploits remains to be seen. Based on Krzanich's wording, it sounds like the upcoming hardware tweaks may simply slow hackers down.

Regardless, it's nice to see Intel sticking to their earlier promise to maintain a greater degree of transparency with their customers regarding the two vulnerabilities.

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"ensuring their upcoming 8th-generation "Xeon Scalable" processors -- codenamed "Cascade Lake" -- won't be as vulnerable to Spectre variants upon release."

So does this mean consumers will have to wait longer until they get a bit of hardware protection?
 
Honestly at this point I consider my Intel product (Skylake processor) defective. Hey Brian Krzanich, want to replace my cpu and mobo?
 
Given recent accusations of additional security holes in AMD CPUs, this announcement seems to be timed rather oddly.
 
This is by far the most overblown vulnerability ever discovered by his point. The only reason people are aware of it is because the media is having a mare. All chips ever made have vulnerabilities in them, you either don’t know about it yet or nobody knows about it yet.

At least no one here is foolish enough to get too carried away considering we are all probably home users and the fixes really haven’t impacted performance at all in these usage scenarios. And we are all smart enough to know that to attack a vulnerability like this takes so much in the way of resources and effort that home users are simply not going to be the target.
 
Given recent accusations of additional security holes in AMD CPUs, this announcement seems to be timed rather oddly.
more like, given recent *backfired* accusations of a third part (sure.. right.. no intel involvment, sure) of additional security holes in AMD CPUS. Security holes that require administrative access. Not to say it isn't a problem if it does infact get infected as you could infect the chip.....

Intels in a good position to just not release the chip and actually fix the problem for next year. Is someone really going to upgrade/build new a system on their new server chips? Not me. Buy old/lease/rent/upgrade next year.

Isn't the majority of the money for these companies in datacenters and other upper level computing? Would you rather explain that the new system is faster with security risks or slightly slower and secure?
 
Incoming cascade lake cpus will have 'rainfall' flaw (in the style of amd ryzen flaw called 'ryzenfall')
 
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