AMD may have been spared from the potential fallout of the Meltdown vulnerability in modern processors, but that doesn’t mean it’s in the clear. The company has also been exposed to the two Spectre flaws, and will be pushing out patches to resolve the issue.
For the most part, AMD has been maintaining that there is a near zero risk to its products. Mostly because Spectre is much harder to exploit, and then AMD processors are only vulnerable to the second form of the speculation execution exploit.
Despite this, the company is working with hardware partners to release firmware updates for EPYC and Ryzen systems. It is also working with Microsoft to figure out why an earlier Windows 10 patch was preventing AMD powered computers from booting.
Mark Papermaster, AMD’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, wrote “while we believe that AMD’s processor architectures make it difficult to exploit Variant 2, we continue to work closely with the industry on this threat. We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat.”
Both Meltdown and Spectre have loomed over Intel and AMD these last couple of weeks, with many companies scrambling to ensure that they are not affected. Microsoft, on its part, admits that any patches may have a negative impact on older Intel processor performance. There’s no word if something similar may affect AMD, but it doesn’t yet look like the case.
[Source: AMD]
