
Ask HN: When will Intel start selling chips that are not vulnerable to Meltdown - phyller
They were informed on June 1, 2017, and appear to have been selling vulnerable chips since then. I have not seen anything indicating that the chips being produced today are not vulnerable. When is this going to end?
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larrymcp
And an interesting follow-on question would be: of the OS patches now being
implemented which sometimes cause a performance hit, will that code later be
able to detect when it's running on a "fixed" processor? So that it can turn
off the unneeded extra protections when running on a newer chip?

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earenndil
Last I checked: the linux kernel initially had a comment saying something to
the effect of "assume all x86 processors are vulnerable." Later, they added a
check for amd, which they don't do mitigations on. It seems likely they'll add
another check, when future processors come out. As for windows and macosx,
it's up for speculation. No other OSes yet have mitigations in place.

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chrisparton1991
Good question, I did some Googling and couldn't find anything either.

Interestingly, not a single result is returned when searching "Meltdown" in
Intel's website. Hopefully Intel will fill us in soon.

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InclinedPlane
The more pertinent question is whether or not Intel (or AMD or ARM CPU makers)
will release a new chip that is out of the box still vulnerable to meltdown or
spectre when running unpatched OSes.

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gtirloni
If the issue is completely fixed by the latest firmware update, they could be
selling chips that are not vulnerable tomorrow.

The question is what's on that firmware update and does it fix the issue
completely.

Last I checked, the kernel fixes only check if it's running on an Intel
processor (and exclude AMD). They aren't checking if they are running on a
certain revision of the chip. That could probably change very quickly if the
firmware is indeed the full fix.

Otherwise expect new silicon to arrive in 6-18 months.

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beamatronic
Perhaps they already have. Are there older chips that do not have the issue?

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taejo
None in the x64 architecture. x86 chips before the Pentium Pro don't have it.
Itanium apparently doesn't either.

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PaulHoule
Maybe the same time we see 10nm chips from Intel and Optane DIMMs.

