Remember the Spectre CPU vulnerability that reared its head for the first time in 2017? Variant 2 of Spectre is back, and as such, Microsoft has published guidance about the mitigation.
Spectre variant 2 RSS
AMD has shared details about a Spectre Variant 2 vulnerability that affects almost all AMD Ryzen, Athlon, and EPYC systems. The security flaw is patched in the latest Patch Tuesday updates.
AMD's Zen 4 has been tested with the various Spectre variant mitigations and the performance is surprisingly good. In fact, overall, the Ryzen 7950X has managed to beat the unpatched system.
Testing the new retpoline mitigation on AMD for Spectre v2 shows that the performance loss with the new patch is nowhere nearly as big as the performance impact incurred by Intel processors.
Intel and ARM are vulnerable to the Spectre-BHB flaw, but AMD is apparently troubled by Spectre v2, which it should have fixed back in 2018. AMD has now issued a new fix for the CVE-2017-5715 bug.
A new CPU exploit based on the infamous Spectre v2 has been discovered. However, when the security patch is applied it can affect performance by up to 36%, that's according to a recent study.
Microsoft has re-released the Intel microcode updates for different versions of Windows 10. The revised version adds support for more processors and is available to download via Windows Update.
An update for the latest version of Windows 10 now mitigates Spectre variant 2 on systems running the April 2018 Update with Coffee Lake, Kaby Lake, Skylake, Haswell, and more processors.
