Hardware manufacturer Intel has released several important announcements earlier this week, but the most important news is the launch of its ninth-generation desktop processors, which provide users with up to 8 cores to ensure better performance than any similar device previously released.
According to the company’s announcement, these chips are compatible with Coffee Lake and the Z370 platform, include a range of Z390 chips and feature multiple associated motherboards. In this sense, most of the announcement has highlighted the Core i9 8-Core, called 9900K, a processor with a speed of up to 5.0 GHz and a performance that is 95W TDP.
Furthermore, the i7-9700K and i7-9600K processors were introduced, both with eight cores and speeds of 4.9 GHz and 4.6 GHz respectively. At the presentation, a slide showed that the three new processors for Meltdown and Spectre are protected, hardware vulnerabilities detected on millions of computers and mobile devices earlier this year.
According to the legend shown in the picture, courtesy of Bleeping Computer, Intel explains:
The new desktop processors provide protection against security vulnerabilities commonly referred to as “Spectre”, “Meltdown” and “L1TF”. These safeguards include a combination of the hardware design changes announced earlier this year and software updates and microcodes.
It is also important that the vulnerabilities “Meltdown v3” and “Terminal Fault” are fixed on the hardware side. The protection of the software against “Spectre” and other variants of “Meltdown” is carried out by means of changes in the microcode. As the “K” in the model name already reveals, the new processor can easily be overclocked.
The slide shows that the vulnerabilities to be addressed are as follows:
- Speculative variant of lateral channel Specter V2 (Branch Target Injection) = Microcode + Software.
- Side channel speculative variant Meltdown V3 (Rogue Data Cache Load) = Hardware.
- Side channel speculative variant Meltdown V3a (Rogue System Register Read) = Microcode.
- Side channel speculative variant V4 (Speculative Store Bypass) = Microcode + Software.
- Speculative lateral channel variant L1 Terminal failure = Hardware.
As we reported in March last year, Intel had promised that it would introduce security measures to protect its upcoming CPUs from some variants of meltdown and specter by partition. In this context, Brian Krzanich, former CEO of Intel, said that although variant 1 would be mitigated by software updates, solutions would be integrated at the hardware design level to fix the bug.