Intel’s Spectre fix is now good-to-go for Broadwell and Haswell processors

By Darren Allan

Last week, Intel released overhauled Spectre fixes for all its newest CPUs – from Skylake onwards – and now the firm has pushed out fresh patches for many Broadwell and Haswell processors too (5th- and 4th-gen models).

These are working Spectre patches that don’t cause the instability problems which the previous fixes did, which led to Intel recommending that folks don’t install them.

Obviously this is good news from a security point of view for those with Broadwell and Haswell chips, with Intel clarifying exactly which Core and Xeon CPUs now have fixed patches.

As the Register reports, on the Broadwell front, patches are now done for processors with these CPU IDs: 50662, 50663, 50664, 40671, 406F1, 306D4 and 40671.

And when it comes to Haswell, the following chips are now good to go: 306C3, 4066, 306F2, 40651 and 306C3.

Patch and push

Note that Intel releasing these patches doesn’t mean you’ll be getting them immediately, as they have been pushed out to hardware manufacturers, and those vendors must now incorporate them in BIOS updates which will be delivered to users going forward.

There’s a slight worry on the performance front with older processors, because these fixes may hit veteran CPUs …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components