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Following on from last week’s initial microcode patches, Intel has released new Spectre fixes for its newest processors.
As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, the microcode patch was actually pretty buggy for a lot of people. However, this new patch is a lot more stable and covers 6th-gen Skylake, 100 series chipsets, 7th-gen Kaby Lake, 200 series chipsets, and 8th-gen Coffee Lake, 300 series chipsets CPUs.
In addition, the X299 Skylake-X chipset, Intel Xeon Scalable and Intel Xeon D processors are also covered.
Don’t go expecting the updates right away though. Intel’s Spectre microcode updates are first released to system and motherboard OEMs who then incorporate them into their BIOS updates.
So what this announcement means in reality is that a Spectre-fixing patches will be hitting consumers in the not-too-distant future.
The bigger problem now facing the chipmaker are the Haswell and Broadwell processors (4th- and 5th-gen), and beyond. Intel has acknowledged that every generation of Core CPUs are affected by Meltdown and Spectre (except for the 1st-gen).
