As part of its ongoing efforts to patch its systems against the Meltdown and Spectre chip flaws, Intel indicated last month that it would be issuing fixes as far back as 2005’s Yorkfield processors. But in a new guidance document the company announces that many of these older platforms will not receive fixes after all.
Specifically, work has been stopped on Spectre Variant 2 mitigations for the chip generations known as Bloomfield, Clarksfield, Gulftown, Harpertown, Jasper Forest, Penryn, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale, and Yorkfield. (You can find more specifics at this great list of Intel codenames on Wikipedia.)
Variant 2 is the toughest of the chip flaws to block or work around, so the creation of fixes is nontrivial — Intel isn’t just copying and pasting stuff into a microcode update for each of these.
In the guidance document (PDF), Intel cited several reasons for stopping development on the fixes:
- Micro-architectural characteristics that preclude a practical implementation of features mitigating Variant 2
- Limited Commercially Available System Software support
- Based on Customer inputs, most of these products are implemented as “closed systems” and therefore are expected to have a lower …read more
Source:: TechCrunch Gadgets
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