Spectre- and Meltdown-hardened Intel CPUs will arrive later this year
As part of its earnings call yesterday, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shared some of the measures the company is taking to harden its chips against the Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Krzanich says that the company "is working to incorporate silicon-based changes to future products that will directly address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware," and he promises that the first products with those mitigations "will begin appearing later this year."
It's important to note that Krzanich describes the company's work on Meltdown and Spectre in both software and hardware as "changes" and "mitigations," not "fixes." That's because similar, as-yet-undiscovered or as-yet-unexploited microarchitectural attacks could still arise in products as complicated as modern ...