Intel Details Cascade Lake, Hardware Mitigations for Meltdown, Spectre

Ever since Meltdown and Spectre were disclosed, Intel’s various customers have been asking how long it would take for hardware fixes to these problems to ship. The fixes will deploy with Cascade Lake, Intel’s next server platform due later this year, but the company is finally lifting the lid on some of those improvements and security enhancements at Hot Chips this week.

Variant 1 will still require software-level protections, while Variant 2 (that’s the “classic” Spectre attack) will require a mixture of hardware and software protection. Variant 3 (Meltdown) will be blocked in hardware, 3a (discovered by ARM) patched via firmware, with Variant 5 (Foreshadow) also patched in hardware. Firmware fixes can be treated as equivalent to hardware since the new systems that’ll launch with Cascade Lake will include them by default.


Overall demand for these parts is expected to be robust, given how rapidly the IT industry is shifting to cloud computing. Any talk of fallout from the initial disclosures has been limited, and there’s no sign that anyone has treated the issue as a reason to jump ship from Intel and adopt its competitors’ hardware. If ARM or AMD are seeing an uptick in adoptions based on these security issues, they have yet to say so.
Continue reading

AMD Will Bring Smart Access Memory Support to Intel, Nvidia Hardware
AMD is reportedly working with Nvidia and Intel to bring hardware support for Smart Access Memory to other GPU and CPU platforms.

Lenovo’s New Legion Gaming Laptops Sport Latest AMD, Nvidia Hardware
The new machines combine AMD's latest CPUs with Nvidia's new mobile GPUs. The price tags won't be in the budget range, but they're much lower than some competing gaming laptops.

Hardware Accelerators May Dramatically Improve Robot Response Times
If we want to build better robots, we need them to be faster at planning their own motion. A new research team thinks it's invented a combined hardware/software deployment method that can cut existing latencies in half.

Sony Will Ship New VR Hardware for PS5, but Not in 2021
Sony will bring a new iteration of the PlayStation Virtual Reality (PSVR) headset to market to support the PS5, but troubled waters and plenty of uncertainty lie ahead for the VR market in general.