Intel won’t patch some of its older processors against Meltdown and Spectre

By Darren Allan

Intel isn’t going to patch some of its older CPUs which are vulnerable to the Meltdown and Spectre flaws, according to a fresh update issued by the company.

The first thing to note here is that the processors in question are niche, older models, but this is still a potential fly in the ointment for some folks who are still using the silicon in question.

As the Register reports, the processors which won’t be getting a patch include chips in the Bloomfield, Clarksfield, Gulftown, Harpertown Xeon C0 and E0, Jasper Forest, Penryn, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale and Yorkfield families (and Xeon variants).

That means CPUs which run the gamut across Core, Xeon, Pentium, Celeron and Atom chips. For example, the Bloomfield processors in question are high-end first-generation models: the Intel Core Processor Extreme Edition i7-975 and i7-965, and Core i7-920, 930, 940, 950, 960 (alongside Xeon offerings).

There are over 230 affected CPUs in total.

Patch problems

Why aren’t these being patched? Intel gives several reasons, the foremost being that the ‘micro-architectural characteristics’ of these processors mean that it’s not actually possible to patch against Spectre Variant 2.

Intel also notes that there is ‘limited commercially available system software support’ for these chips …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components