Intel has been plagued with a lot of bad press and issues when dealing with Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. The company also didn’t have a good time at CES this year because of the two vulnerabilities. Despite dealing with everything, the chipmaker is promising to bring updated chips with built-in mitigation for Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities later this year, according to report from The Washington Post.
Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich made the announcement at the company’s fourth quarter earnings call. Previous to this, Intel tried to bring patches to help fix the vulnerabilities only to end up causing more issues like random reboots on older and newer CPUs. Thus, they ended up being flawed patches that the company ended up telling vendors to not issue anymore.
Despite Intel having a rough several months, the company reported 4 percent year-over-year growth to $17.1 billion. It’s worth noting that the threat of Meltdown and Spectre still looms at large over the entire tech industry. Intel apparently has been working on a long-term solution.
Even though Intel said that it’s working on a long-term solution, the lack of additional information is raising a lot of eyebrows and more questions rather than answers. PC World points out that Intel didn’t address when exactly the new vulnerability-proof chips would land in the market, or how they’ll target the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, as well as how the fixes will affect performance.
It’s definitely worth mentioning that Google’s Project Zero researchers discovered the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities last year. They’re errors that can allow hackers to steal data running in other apps on hardware from AMD, ARM, and Intel. Since the discovery, many major tech companies have been scrambling to release fixes for their hardware. Google apparently managed to fix the vulnerabilities on their own to protect their users and products.
