LAS VEGAS — Intel's (INTC) chief executive publicly addressed the chip security flaw that rattled investors when it was revealed last week, as new issues surfaced Tuesday with patches for machines featuring chips from its rival, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
X At his opening keynote speech at the CES consumer technology trade show, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich late Monday framed the chip problem as an industrywide issue and said progress has been made in patching the exploits discovered by Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google.
He thanked the information technology industry for coming together to tackle the security issues, known as Spectre and Meltdown.
"The collaboration among so many companies to address this industrywide issue across several different processor architectures has been truly remarkable," Krzanich said. "Security is job No. 1 for Intel and our industry."
Meanwhile, Microsoft (MSFT) on Tuesday reported a setback in its efforts to fix the security issues. It suspended issuing patches to guard against the threats after users of PCs with AMD chips complained that the software updates froze their computers.
AMD shares, which rose much of last week, tumbled 3.8% to 11.82. Intel shares dropped 2.5% to close at 43.62 on the stock market today.
Krzanich recommended PC and smartphone users update their operating systems to get the latest protections in software patches.
"As of now we have not received any information that these exploits have been used to obtain customer information," he said. "We're working tirelessly on these issues to ensure it stays that way."
Intel expects to issue updates to more than 90% of its processors released in the past five years within a week, and the remaining by the end of January.
During his keynote, Krzanich discussed Intel 's work in artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and immersive media, such as virtual reality.
He also provided an update on Intel's research into new types of computing: neuromorphic computing and quantum computing.
Neuromorphic computing mimics the way the human brain learns and understands. Intel plans to share with researchers a neuromorphic chip called Loihi later this year.
Krzanich said Intel has shipped its first 49-qubit quantum computing test chip, called Tangle Lake. Quantum computing is the ultimate in parallel processing, he said, noting that it has the potential to compute at far greater speeds than anything achieved before.
