All new chips will come with built-in mitigations for the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities

Jan 26, 2018 13:25 GMT  ·  By

Intel is reportedly planning to release new, updated processors later this year that come with built-in mitigations for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities publicly disclosed earlier this month.

Security researchers from the Graz University of Technology, Cyberus Technology, Google Project Zero, and several other universities have unearthed the worst hardware bugs in the history of computing. Dubbed Meltdown and Specter, the two security vulnerability put billions of devices at risk of attacks.

All modern processors from Intel and AMD are affected by one or the two variants of the Spectre vulnerability, as well as by the Meltdown flaw. The industry has worked together in the past several months to address these issues while keeping Spectre and Meltdown a secret from the world, until early this month.

Both Intel and AMD released mitigations against Spectre and Meltdown, though Intel has had some hardware problems with its latest microcode firmware, urging the industry to revert to the previous version until the issue is fixed, and now the company announced plans to release new Spectre- and Meltdown-proof chips later this year.

Intel promises long-term solution for Spectre and Meltdown

According to PC World, Intel's chief executive Brian Krzanich announced that new chips are coming later this year, during the company's Q4 earnings call, but it didn't say when these new processors will land, nor how they will perform comparing to previous chips that have been patched against the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerability through new firmware.

In a report, The Washington Post notes the fact that Intel told investors on Thursday that the company is working "around the clock" to address the Spectre and Meltdown security flaws, claiming it has a long-term solution to these hardware bugs, but no details surfaced at the moment of writing. In the meanwhile, Intel urges users to make it a habit to keep their PCs up-to-date at all times.