AMD starts delivering their own Meltdown and Spectre patches

While processor manufacturer AMD initially claimed their chips were not vulnerable to Speculative Execution flaws, later research showed that this was not completely true and that flaws in Speculative Execution could allow hackers to exfiltrate data from your PC.

Microsoft’s OS-level patch for the issue appeared to cause more harm than good, however, causing Microsoft to pull it from distribution.

AMD itself, however, has now started delivering a fix to PC and motherboard OEMs to push out to their clients.

AMD says:

AMD will make optional microcode updates available to our customers and partners for Ryzen and EPYC processors starting this week. We expect to make updates available for our previous generation products over the coming weeks. These software updates will be provided by system providers and OS vendors; please check with your supplier for the latest information on the available option for your configuration and requirements.

AMD is also working with Microsoft to fix the issue with their existing OS-level patch, saying:

We expect this issue to be corrected shortly and Microsoft should resume updates for these older processors by next week.

AMD has not clarified the performance impact of the patches on their chips, but unfortunately in this case safety would need to come first.

Read AMD’s full release here.

Via The Verge