Intel rolls out new Spectre patches for Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake platforms

Intel has rolled out updated Spectre patches for its Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors. The patches help address Spectre variant 2 attacks. The updates will be issued through OEM firmware pushes.

Intel’s Navin Shenoy wrote, " have now released production microcode updates to our OEM customers and partners for Kaby Lake- and Coffee Lake-based platforms, plus additional Skylake-based platforms. This represents our 6th, 7th, and 8th Generation Intel Core product lines as well as our latest Intel Core X-series processor family. It also includes our recently announced Intel Xeon Scalable and Intel Xeon D processors for data center systems."

Older processors using the Broadwell and Haswell cores still do not have a fixed microcode update available. Intel claims that the updates for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Broadwell and Haswell processors are in beta.

Customers running machines with the newer chips can expect to receive the microcode soon; Intel said it had passed on the updates to PC makers for its sixth, seventh, and eighth generation Core processors.

Intel previously issued a patch to address Spectre, but then had to tell users to stop deploying the fix because it sometimes caused computers to spontaneously reboot.