01-12-2018, 10:42 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-12-2018, 10:42 PM by SteelCrysis.)
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/26...nerability
Quote:When MS and AMD referred to these bugs as affecting old chips, they weren’t kidding. Assuming AMD properly gave its own full brand names in each case, as they did with the Turion X2 Ultra, AMD’s Athlon is over a decade old, as is the original Opteron brand. These references could conceivably refer to newer cores, but even the Turion X2 Ultra turns 10 this year. Owners of Ryzen or even Piledriver-derived hardware don’t seem to have much to worry about.
As for Variant 2 (Branch Target Injection, the variant MS believes has the greatest chance of harming performance), AMD continues to believe the company’s architecture makes it difficult to exploit. AMD is distributing microcode updates and MS has OS patches to coming to make this issue harder to leverage for system attacks. Once again, no performance impact information has been published.
AMD’s overall position in this statement is consistent with its previous guidance on January 3rd. The company stated then that vulnerability to Variant 2 had not yet been demonstrated on an AMD system. The company’s new language, which states that Variant 2 is “difficult” to exploit, represents a departure from its previous message. But with no context for how easy or difficult the exploit might be, we can’t gauge the size of the shift or the new relative risk.