If you’ve been following the ongoing Spectre and Meltdown saga, you know that Intel has been the vendor most affected by the two chip vulnerabilities. Lisa Su, AMD’s chief executive, reiterated AMD’s prior position that the company’s chips aren’t vulnerable to Meltdown, nor to some of the iterations of potential Spectre exploits. Here’s how Su explained it: “For Spectre variant 1, we continue actively working with our ecosystem partners on mitigations, including operating system packages that have begun to roll out,” Su said. “We continue to believe that variant 2 of Spectre is difficult to exploit on AMD processors. However, we are deploying CPU microcode packages that in combination with operating system patches, provide additional mitigation steps. “Longer term, we have included changes in our future processsor cores, starting with our Zen 2 design, to further address potential Spectre-like exploits,” Su added. “We continue to collaborate closely with the industry on these vulnerabilities, and are committed to protecting AMD users on these and other security threats, as they arise.” Put another way, it won’t be until 2019 that AMD solves its Spectre problem. Based on AMD’s extensive roadmap that the company recently revealed, the next-gen Zen 2 architecture won’t be released until next year. |