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August 21, 2018 10:00 pm

Intel Details Cascade Lake, Hardware Mitigations for Meltdown, Spectre

An anonymous reader shares a report: Ever since Meltdown and Spectre were disclosed, Intel's various customers have been asking how long it would take for hardware fixes to these problems to ship. The fixes will deploy with Cascade Lake, Intel's next server platform due later this year, but the company is finally lifting the lid on some of those improvements and security enhancements at Hot Chips this week. One major concern? Putting back the performance that previous solutions have lost as a result of Meltdown and Spectre. It's hard to quantify exactly what this looks like, because the impact tends to be extremely workload-dependent. But Intel's guidance has been in the 5-10 percent range, depending on workload and platform, and with the understanding that older CPUs were sometimes hit harder than newer ones. Intel wasn't willing to speak to exactly what kind of uplift users should expect, but Lisa Spelman, VP of Intel's Data Center Group, told AnandTech that the new hardware solutions would have an "impact" on the performance hit from mitigation, and that overall performance would improve at the platform level regardless. Variant 1 will still require software-level protections, while Variant 2 (that's the "classic" Spectre attack) will require a mixture of hardware and software protection. Variant 3 (Meltdown) will be blocked in hardware, 3a (discovered by ARM) patched via firmware, with Variant 5 (Foreshadow) also patched in hardware.

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