Metldown And Spectre: Intel Promises To Fix 90% of 5 Year Old Chips Before Next Week Ends

The silicon giant has started rolling out security updates for all Intel-powered devices affected by the vulnerabilities Meltdown and Spectre that Google Project Zero team made public on Wednesday. Known to have existed on devices released since 1995, these Intel CPU bugs could allow an attacker to access restricted areas of the operating system’s kernel memory.

Intel said in a press release, before the end of next week, that they fix 90% of the affected devices released in the last five years.

Regarding the speculated PC slowdowns because of the security updates, the impact will be workload dependent and everyday users might not notice any difference. They have strengthened their claims with test reports from major companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

“While on some discrete workloads the performance impact from the software updates may initially be higher, additional post-deployment identification, testing and improvement of the software updates should mitigate that impact.”

Users are advised to keep the automatic updates functionality on their machines enabled to receive the security updates for Intel CPU bug at the earliest, possibly via system update or the vendor’s PC management app. Apart from this, Microsoft has issued security patches for Windows, Edge, and IE. For Firefox, mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre are available with Firefox 57.0.4 update and these will be available with Chrome 64.

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