Intel Releases Fixed Spectre Patch For Skylake CPUs

Intel announced that it has released to its hardware partners a fixed version of its previously bugged Spectre-mitigating patch for Skylake CPUs.

Sarcasm aside, at least Intel has made progress on the issue. The company’s last update said that progress had been made on root-causing the issue on Haswell platforms, but evidently that hasn’t borne fruit yet. Not only has Spectre 2 not yet been patched for a huge number of users, but a possibly equally huge number of users are currently stuck with the effects of Intel’s previous, buggy patch. Earlier, we reported that examples of Meltdown and Spectre exploits have already been spotted on the net, so what was once consolation in there being no evidence of Spectre-based exploits might be disappearing.

Intel’s microcode updates are given to system OEMs that distribute them to users in the form of system BIOS updates. Intel previously said that it had made available an interim patch without the Spectre Variant 2-related elements that was the cause of the random-reboots. We haven’t seen any system OEM release a BIOS update based on it, however. To help those with systems affected by the random-reboot issue in the meantime, Microsoft released a Windows-based kill-switch that is capable of nullifying Intel’s bugged patch.