Intel CPUs are getting a redesign to protect against Spectre

The Spectre issue caused a lot of trouble in the industry, and now Intel is redesigning their CPUs to eliminate the threat.

Intel has recently revealed that they are working on new hardware protection against the Specter CPU flaw. When the issue was discovered, the best that could be done were some OS updates and that’s it. It did a mostly good job, however, it did sacrifice some performance, anywhere from 2% to 20%. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich says the company has “redesigned parts of the processor to introduce new levels of protection through partitioning” that will protect against the Spectre variants. Intel’s next-generation Xeon processors (Cascade Lake) will include the new partitioning, alongside 8th generation Intel Core processors that ship in the second half of 2018.

This new partitioning system will separate regular applications and the user privilege levels to deter vulnerabilities like Spectre. They also revealed that the security updates are available for all products launched in the last five years. And it looks like the new updates are stable and are not causing any reboots or causing new problems.