Enlarge / Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon E7 v2 die shot. (credit: Fritzchens Fritz)
Shipping in the second half of this year, the next generation of Xeon Scalable Processors (codenamed Cascade Lake) will contain hardware fixes for the Meltdown attack and certain variants of the Spectre attack. So, too, will a range of processors using the same 8th generation Core branding that some processors are already using.
Earlier this year, attacks that exploit the processor’s speculative execution were published with the names Meltdown and Spectre, prompting a reaction from hardware and software companies.
The Spectre attack has two variants, numbered version 1 and version 2. Spectre version 1 attacks will need software fixes, and the nature of these attacks means that they may always need software fixes. Applications that try to build sandboxes—locked-down environments used for running potentially hostile code, such as JavaScript in the browser—will need to be examined and updated to provide robust protection against Spectre version 1.