With Meltdown and Spectre security flaws taking over the internet from the past couple of days, Intel after confirming the memory leak issues, today announced that it has already issued updates for the majority of the processors. It also said that it expects to roll out security updates to 90% of processors released in the past five years by the end of next week.
Furthermore, the company has also mentioned that most operating system vendors, public cloud service providers, device manufacturers and others have confirmed to have already updated their products and services. However, Intel didn’t disclose any time frame for security updates to the processors greater than five years old since reports suggest that up to 10 years of Intel chipsets are affected.
It is expected that the fix to the security flaw will incur performance drop by 5-30% depending on the chipset age and configuration, but Intel says that performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and the change shouldn’t be very significant for an average user.
Even if there is any, it will be mitigated over time. Testing and improvement of the software updates should mitigate the impact of some discrete workloads from the software updates. Intel urges computer users worldwide to enable auto-update feature and keep the systems updated all the time.
Microsoft has also announced that it will release an update for Surface devices to protect them against the chip vulnerability. The updates will be available to devices running Windows 10 with Windows Update or through the Microsoft Download Center.