Spectre? Meltdown? Intel? AMD?

Edgar R. Zakarian · January 19, 2018

Can someone please explain in short what is going on?

What is spectre and what is meant by meltdown?

What?

I haven't updated my bios to the latest, cause I've heard of the performance problems in the "rushed" new patches.

MrDrWho13 · January 19, 2018

There are 3 different vulnerabilities which are caused by "speculative execution" where your CPU will try to guess what's going to happen next. If it guesses correctly then you already have the answer so things happen faster. (So speculative execution speeds up your CPU sort of)

The issues are that some programs could be designed to read this guessed data from your cache and steal it. There aren't yet any malicious programs exploiting this but it's possible.

Meltdown is the name of one of these vulnerabilities which is Intel-only. Spectre is the name for the other two which affect all CPU designs which use speculative execution (So pretty much all recent CPUs from Intel, AMD, and ARM).

Realistically, the only permanent fix is a brand new CPU design. However, many companies are issuing software patches (Like for your OS and browser) to stop programs from exploiting it.

The headlines advertise "up to 30% performance loss" but this is really over-hyped. You'll only notice this with workstations (like server farms), so most consumer/gaming PCs won't have a noticeable impact.

Every day new bugs like this are found and silently patched by Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. The only difference with these bugs is that they were publicised before the patches were ready, so they make exciting headlines.

My advice is to make sure that Windows updates are enabled and carry on with your life.

https://lifehacker.com/whats-going-on-with-the-spectre-and-meltdown-patches-1822128503

https://ds9a.nl/articles/posts/spectre-meltdown/

captain_to_fire · January 19, 2018

48 minutes ago, Edgar R. Zakarian said:

What is spectre and what is meant by meltdown?

What?

Here you go.

50 minutes ago, Edgar R. Zakarian said:

I haven't updated my bios to the latest, cause I've heard of the performance problems in the "rushed" new patches.

You don’t have to update your BIOS. It will be in the form of Windows Updates. https://support.microsoft.com/en-ph/help/4073757/protect-your-windows-devices-against-spectre-meltdown

If you’re using a third party anti virus program, make sure it’s up to date and that’s the time Windows will start downloading the update but if you’re using Windows Defender then you’re good.