Intel has told everyone to stop installing its current Spectre patch, as the company is busy working on a version that doesn’t cause older computers to randomly reboot. The revised patch is currently being tested by Intel’s partners; although this is no indication of when it will be ready to be deployed.
For now the company is recommending “that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior.”
Reports of rebooting issues appeared shortly after Intel’s original patch to fix the Spectre vulnerability went live. Largely affecting older Broadwell and Haswell processors. Intel says that it has discovered the root of the problem, and has come up with a solution that should work around it.
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The Spectre vulnerability is considered to be a rather tricky problem to overcome. It involves rewriting how processors deal with assigned tasks efficiently, and fixing it has resulted in computers actually becoming slower.
Unlike Meltdown, which was discovered at the same time, Spectre affects all modern processors from AMD, ARM, and Intel. Most of these manufacturers have already released security patches and fixed the problem. It would seem that the only holdouts against this are those older Intel chips that apparently went untested during the first round of development.
[Source: Intel]
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