I have read a lot of articles about the infected CPU’s with Spectre, but I couldn’t understand what’s Spectre and which Intel CPUs generations are affected?
Spectre and Meltdown are two different vulnerabilities that arose as a result of how CPUs were optimised for speed is the extremely short version, they could potentially allow someone to take over your machine (though this has yet to be seen in the wild)
As per Wikipedia:
Meltdown
Meltdown is a hardware vulnerability affecting Intel x86 microprocessors, IBM POWER processors, and some ARM-based microprocessors.[1][2][3] It allows a rogue process to read all memory, even when it is not authorized to do so.
Spectre is a vulnerability that affects modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction.[1][2][3] On most processors, the speculative execution resulting from a branch misprediction may leave observable side effects that may reveal private data to attackers. For example, if the pattern of memory accesses performed by such speculative execution depends on private data, the resulting state of the data cache constitutes a side channel through which an attacker may be able to extract information about the private data using a timing attack.
All generations of Intel Core cpus, IBM Power, and some ARM CPUS are effected by Meltdown. Spectre effects potentially every CPU for a long time back, all of the above but also including AMD.
Others can do a FAR better job of explaining this. This is a very surface level look leaving out a lot of information though the wiki links are there for further jumping points.
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so even If I get the latest CPU’s from intel 7th gen or 8th gen It will has the same issue. Right?
Yes. There are patches for them mostly now but they can have performance degradation depending on what you are doing, something will be slower others will be unaffected.
I believe the new 9th gen chips will have meltdown or specter protection built in.
I have to google to see which, but I swore I read that on wikichip.
Yes but the laptop that I want to buy has a 7th generation CPU which is ok, but I have checked it only comes with the 7th gen.
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What laptop is it?
The Lenovo Thinkpad 25
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Dont make your current buying decision on what cpu is and isnt affected by spectre and meltdown. New ways of exploiting the flaws are being found all the time so a cpu that is secure now might not be so secure in the future
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Yes I agree, I think I will just choose the one I like. Thanks
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Most of these flaws also need a prior compromise of the system in order to be used.
That’s a very large problem for Amazon’s AWS, where hardware resources are shared. It’s much less of a problem for a personal desktop or laptop that’s usually protected from the internet by NAT on a residential ISP connection.
Whilst that is true, meltdown was so brain bendingly stupid on intel’s part (in my opinion) that if there’s stuff like that in play (in addition to the multiple hyperthreading vulnerabilities that have come out in the past 2-3 years), i’d be giving intel a miss if you in any way care about security for now.
That’s my personal opinion, but I suspect it isn’t just dumb luck that AMD avoided a number of these flaws, i’m more inclined to believe that they deliberately did not optimise that way because of the safety concerns.
2c, YMMV, etc.
This is why I have changed my mind and decided to build a new desktop but this time I’m going with the Ryzen 2700x, I think AMD is doing really well. Most of the power that I will need is for editing and some gaming.
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