Intel Cascade Lake Processors To Get Hardware Protections Against Spectre

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 03/16/2018 09:19 AM | source: | 12 comment(s)

Intel has announced it is releasing the first series of Xeon processors under the name cascade lake in the second half of this year. The new processors will be hardware protected against the second variant of the Spectre vulnerability, or at least better protected.

Cascade Lake will be a 14nm refresh of Skylake-E/X. In addition to that, Core processors of the 8th generation that will be released in the second half of 2018 will be protected against Spectre variant 2 and Meltdown. precisely which processors that entail is not explained. For the first variant of Spectre, protection remains to be a software-based solution, for the time being. Intel did not publish any details on the hardware protection.

Intel - While Variant 1 will continue to be addressed via software mitigations, we are making changes to our hardware design to further address the other two. We have redesigned parts of the processor to introduce new levels of protection through partitioning that will protect against both Variants 2 and 3. Think of this partitioning as additional “protective walls” between applications and user privilege levels to create an obstacle for bad actors. These changes will begin with our next-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (code-named Cascade Lake) as well as 8th Generation Intel® Core™ processors expected to ship in the second half of 2018. As we bring these new products to market, ensuring that they deliver the performance improvements people expect from us is critical. Our goal is to offer not only the best performance, but also the best secure performance.

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fantaskarsef
Senior Member

Posts: 11536
Joined: 2014-07-21

#5528712 Posted on: 03/16/2018 09:28 AM

Now I'm curious if they'll be able to push the rudimentary 5% improvement even though their patches cost them 5% of power right now. Upgrade to get last year's performance at the time when last year's CPU was released doesn't sound very tempting at all...

AsiJu
Senior Member

Posts: 6351
Joined: 2010-10-16

#5528728 Posted on: 03/16/2018 10:29 AM

How about Meltdown? Can it be fixed via hardware without needing firmware level protection or would that need redesigning the architecture?

Not implying anything, just curious.

RealNC
Senior Member

Posts: 3142
Joined: 2011-11-24

#5528732 Posted on: 03/16/2018 11:01 AM

I love how "we're fixing our broken shit" turns into "it's protected against" in marketing. It's like shipping a car that randomly explodes, and then in the new model you're saying "we're so awesome, the new car is even better than the old one, it's protected against randomly exploding."

fantaskarsef
Senior Member

Posts: 11536
Joined: 2014-07-21

#5528735 Posted on: 03/16/2018 11:36 AM

I love how "we're fixing our broken crap" turns into "it's protected against" in marketing. It's like shipping a car that randomly explodes, and then in the new model you're saying "we're so awesome, the new car is even better than the old one, it's protected against randomly exploding."

Yeah, nothing has changed my opinion about Intel as much as how they treated the whole Meltdown / Spectre topic, along with their lackluster support combined with that all too clearly noobish PR along...

Embra
Senior Member

Posts: 1006
Joined: 2014-11-19

#5528739 Posted on: 03/16/2018 12:55 PM

And of course the "NEW" cpus will have this protection built-in, so run out and grab you one. I am still hopeful for a proper fix for my 4790k.

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