UPDATE: Please see Meltdown and Spectre for important additional information regarding Intel and other affected processors, including AMD and ARM in specific situations.
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Just a very few quick words about a new Intel CPU security problem. You may have heard that a new, serious security bug has been discovered in generations of Intel CPU chips used in most consumer and business computers. I won’t get into the technical details here right now, but it’s a mess. The good news is that fixes will be rolling out in operating system updates (if you have computers that are still getting updates, that is!) — there’s nothing for most users to do themselves to manually deal with this — but these fixes will significantly degrade the performance of affected systems.
Users of computers with AMD CPU chips are (as far as we know currently) not vulnerable to this particular security bug. However, it is possible that some operating system updates to fix the Intel bug will have the side effect of unnecessarily reducing the performance of AMD CPU chips as well, if those patches don’t differentiate between the two different manufacturers. Obviously, AMD is working hard to avoid this situation in the CPU bug fix patches being developed and deployed by various entities to fix the Intel bug.
Intel has released a statement claiming that the same class of exploits can affect other CPU manufacturers. One of my readers wrote to tell me that while the specific issue now being patched does not affect AMD CPU chips, information about the broader exploit class (and other related problems that may involve manufacturers other than Intel) could be going public shortly. I do not have independent confirmation regarding these broader issues at this time.
I’ll say more about this all as additional information becomes available.
–Lauren–
UPDATE: Please see Meltdown and Spectre for important additional information regarding Intel and other affected processors, including AMD and ARM in specific situations.