But what silicon?!! Be sure and read the questions Wall Street should have asked.
Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich told investors recently that the firm plans to release silicon with built-in mitigations to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities later this year, a statement that raises more questions than it answers.
For Intel, it really has been a Tale of Two Cities scenario: Intel reported the best quarter in its history, as fourth-quarter 2017 revenue grew 4 percent year-over-year to $17.1 billion. But Intel has also been the face of Spectre and Meltdown (go.pcworld.com/ spme), two critical vulnerabilities built into basically every processor it ships into the PC and server markets.
Why this matters: Intel has been busy working with PC makers and OS vendors like Microsoft to release microcode that includes so-called mitigations, microcode updates that patch the vulnerabilities. But even that hasn’t gone so well: Intel advised end users to stop applying patches (go.pcworld.com/apat) after systems unexpectedly rebooted. Now, Intel has revealed it’s working on a more permanent fix, but the impact on users remains unknown.
‘SECURITY IS A TOP PRIORITY’
“Security is a top priority for Intel, foundational to our products, and it’s critical to the expanse of our data-centric strategy,” Krzanich told investors in a conference call. “Our near-term focus is on delivering high quality mitigations to protect our customers’ infrastructure from these exploits. We’re working to create silicon-based changes to future products, that will directly address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware. And those products will begin appearing later this year.”
This story is from the March 2018 edition of PCWorld.
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This story is from the March 2018 edition of PCWorld.
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