Intel hasn't given up on its efforts to show how much it cares about people affected by the critical Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that were revealed a while ago. The first batch of security patches that Intel released resulted in several problems for users' machines.
Later, the world's second-largest chipmaker had to advise users not to apply the updates. For a bug-free future, Intel's CEO promised last month that Intel chips released later this year would be free of the Meltdown and Spectre flaws.
Now, Intel has released a new Spectre security patch for the Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake architectures that power the 6th, 7th, and 8th generation Intel Core processor lines. The patch also applies to the Intel Core X-series, as well as the Xeon Scalable and Xeon D chips.
The new microcode update includes a mitigation technique called “Retpoline” for the Spectre 2 (Branch Target Injection) variant. Developed by Google, it is one of multiple mitigation techniques that Intel provided as part of the security update that went through “extensive testing by customers and industry partners to ensure the updates are production-ready.”.
Intel will release the new microcode to OEM partners and will roll it out to affected machines via system updates. Perhaps this time, the update doesn't cause further issues like it did in the past.
