AMD’s Zen 2 Will Address Spectre and Meltdown Exploits
AMD’s latest financial earnings came with a much needed update regarding the Spectre and Meltdown exploits that have been giving chipmakers many sleepless nights since their discovery late last year.
CEO Lisa Su has stated that Spectre variant 1 will continue to receive patches to combat the exploit.
“For Spectre Variant 1, we continue actively working with our ecosystem partners on mitigations, including operating system patches that have begun to roll out.”
And as for Spectre variant 2, AMD has once again iterated that its processors are not vulnerable. However, AMD will be “deploying CPU microcode patches that in combination with OS updates provide additional mitigation steps”. We can expect to see the upcoming Zen+ lineup, which is basically current Zen architecture on 12nm process, to ship with these updates.
AMD’s next-generation Zen 2 lineup built on 7nm process will have architecture-level changes to address Spectre.
“Longer term, we have included changes in our future processor cores, starting with our Zen 2 design, to further address potential Spectre-like exploits,”.
Rival Intel announced similar plans last week. Unlike AMD whose lineup is affected primarily by Spectre, Intel’s x86 processors were discovered to be vulnerable by both Spectre and Meltdown. Intel has promised silicon-level updates to address both exploits in the products coming later this year.
via zdnet
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