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Comment by w0utert | Hacker News Reader

How many of these security leaks still need software patches for Sunny Cove? I thought Intel implemented hardware mitigations for pretty much all of them in the 10th generation chips?

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Some security issues require software patches but those CPUs also include hardware improvements which strive to reduce overhead to negligible value.

According to Anandtech [0] only Spectre V1 requires pure software mitigation.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14664/testing-intel-ice-lake-...

This sounds very promising. But it also sounds like something that PR would write. I think we'll have to wait some time until independent researchers get their hands on these chips and give them a thorough testing.

I'm also taking that with a grain of salt since AT has a habit of not challenging Intel that often, and only issuing some weak response even when it turns out it was PR. Of course this may not be the case this time.

I read somewhere that it would take several years and generations for them to be fixed on the hardware side.

Some "hardware patches" are microcode changes that also result in performance degradation.

Maybe, but that's hardly relevant when comparing performance of these chips to e.g. Ryzen 2, as there is no way to disable these mitigations on Ice Lake anyway, it's simply what you get out of the box.

The big gotcha is that meaningful mitigation of ZombieLoad on affected chips requires disabling Hyperthreading (the hyperthreading-based version of the attack cannot be fixed in microcode or software) but Intel has taken the position that this isn't actually necessary on normal consumer machines. So when Intel say that they have hardware fixes for all this stuff it's not clear whether they mean they've actually fixed it.

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