It was difficult to miss the news about two critical vulnerabilities, Spectre and Meltdown, which flooded the Internet in the beginning of this year. Nevertheless, it was something that companies were aware since last summer. Many of them chose to ignore it until Google Project Zero published the details of vulnerability this year. It looks like Intel was one of those companies. Even though Intel was one of the first to react to the news in January by releasing patches for Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake, Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake processors, the company quickly realised that the patches caused overloads, crashes, and other instabilities. To add even more confusion to existing havoc, Intel tried to conceal the information about the ineffectiveness of its intervention saying that the issues concern only Broadwell and Haswell families. In the end, the processor manufacturing giant admitted the issues and urged people not to install any patches. Now, who says that a life of an IT specialist lacks excitement?
A corrected version of microcode patches was released at the beginning of this month. However, it was only for mobile and desktop Skylake processors. Recently, after a month of intensive testing, the company released corrected patches for Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and Skylake. These are 6th, 7th, 8th generation Intel Core i processors, also including Core X, Xeon Scalable, and Xeon D.
The green light is given – if your computer fits the specifications, you should update it as soon as possible. To install the patch, you much manually install the driver for your motherboard and chipset. If you feel it’s a little be too much for you, ask your local IT support, like Bits and PCs in London.