Meltdown fix on Coffee Lake refresh

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Petr

New Member
Apr 22, 2017
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Hello.

Does anyone please have a clue if all Coffee Lake refresh processors have fixes for Meltdown and/or Spectre? This article at Anandtech suggest CFL-R has a hardware fix for meltdown (variant 3) and for variant 5:
Intel’s New Core and Xeon W-3175X Processors: Spectre and Meltdown Security Update

The Core i7-9900K, i7-9700K and i5-9600K launched last year are all based on P0 stepping according to ARK database - Products formerly Coffee Lake (select appropriate processor and then "Ordering and Compliance" on the left).

Actually all the new processors are based on P0 except i5-9400F, which is listed as using U0, likely the same U0 as in case of non-refresh Coffee Lake (such as i5-8600K), and i3-9350KF, where the information is missing completely.

Does this mean some of the new processors are not fixed? Maybe only CPUs based on 8-core silicon have fixes? I am looking for some new i3 processors because of ECC and low TDP but meltdown fix is essential as my workloads are I/O heavy.

Thank you.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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Complete hardware fixes for meltdown are still at least a year away from market, all there is at the moment is mitigations in a) microcode and b) OS kernels, plus two hardware fixes in the coffee lake refresh.

Why an i3 for an IO-heavy workload? As mstone says, if you want something immune to meltdown (and all but one of the spectre variants IIRC), try and buy an EPYC or other Zen-based chip.
 

Stephan

Well-Known Member
Apr 21, 2017
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Germany
Since new attack variants keep appearing and people are now actively looking into every possible function unit on the chip to exploit, even in late 2018 and now in 2019, I would say we are 3-5 years away from any good silicon fixes. Intel got caught really bad on the wrong foot here and I presume the Haifa lab is very busy figuring out methods to thwart all these attacks. Up until then, yeah fixes will be Microcode only, or fixes in software itself like "Retpoline". Usually both come with a performance penalty. You will know Intel has something when the ad says "SUPER SECURE NEW PROCESSOR". Until then the cores are still the same old Intel Core x86_64. ;-)