Intel announced the rollout of software patches to deal with the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. The patches apply to Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and Skylake processors while the same for Broadwell, Haswell, and Ivy Bridge chips are still being formulated.
Specifically, the above patch codes will apply to Kaby Lake H-, S-, X-, G-, U-, and Y-series of chips, along with the Kaby Lake-R U-series of processors. As for the Coffee Lake family —it is the H- and S-series that has been patched. As Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group further elaborated the latest patches applied to the 6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel Core family of chips.
In the same manner, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation of chips namely Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell Core and Broadwell family of chips are next in line to get similar patches. The said update is currently in beta stages and will eventually be released post verification and testing process.
There is no word though on when the update for the older Intel chips will be made available.
Intel has been on to the job right away after the vulnerabilities were first discovered. Unfortunately, the first lot of the patch software were far from impressive as early adopters reported experiencing stability issues or unexpected reboots. The chip maker worked on these and issued a fresh lot of patches, which hopefully should do a better job this time instead of creating more problems.
Intel said the patches have already been passed on to its OEM partners. It is now up to the individual manufacturers to pass on the codes to its customers, with there being reports of the end-users in some regions having already started to receive the patches as well.
The above would be in the form of a BIOS update which the user would be prompted to download and install on their devices. Users would do good to be on the watch out for emails or other notifications from their manufacturers informing them of the patch being ready.
However, while installing the latest patch is always recommended, users should also be wary of mischief makers who could be masquerading as the company representative and offer a dubious piece of codes that end up hacking their systems instead of securing those.
