The 9th generation Intel Core is protected against hardware Meltdown and Specter

[Blexfraptor]

Intel announced yesterday the Intel Core i9-9900K, the Intel Core i7-9700K and the Intel Core i5-9600K, its new mid-range and high-end processors within the mainstream segment. These chips, together with the Z390 motherboards, will be his bet for next year using 14 nm, even though AMD will launch 7 nm chips in just a few months.

Specter and Meltdown are no longer a problem with each generation of Intel

Although they are 14 nm, and are a "refresh" of Coffee Lake, these processors have various modifications inside. In addition to having more cores and more frequency, all 9th generation processors are protected against Meltdown and Specter at the hardware level.

Thus, in addition to having "the best processors to play", Intel confirmed in the presentation protection against some of the vulnerabilities that were related to Specter and Meltdown. However, not all are fixed, and for now the thing is like this:

Specter V1 (Bounds Check Bypass): protection in the operating system
Specter V2 (Branch Target Injection): protection in microcode and software
Specter V3 (Rogue Data Cache Load): hardware protection
Meltdown V3a (Rogue System Register Read): protection in the microcode
Meltdown V4 (Speculative Store Bypass): protection in microcode and software
Meltdown V5 (L1 Terminal Fault): hardware protection

The main novelty is found in Meltdown V3 and V5, which until now were patched by firmware. From now on, those protections will be hardware. The rest remain as they were in previous processors. These modifications are not available in the Skylake-X processors of 9th generation presented yesterday, since these chips do not make changes at the silicon level, which does Coffee Lake-R.

Vulnerabilities barely have an impact on the performance of processors
Little by little Intel is incorporating security improvements in these processors, and it is expected that all vulnerabilities will be patched in the future through hardware. In fact, the Specter V2 variant is patched by hardware and by operating system in the Cascade Lake processors.

Thanks to these hardware solutions, Intel processors will gradually improve their performance; not only for the improvements that each generation brings, but that up to 8% of performance that was lost by applying the patches will decrease. From the own Intel they affirm that the loss of yield by the solutions applied in these processors is already almost non-existent. Variant 1 will be the most difficult to fix, since it requires deeper changes at the design level.