Intel promises to release a hardware solution for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities later this year. The company announced this in its quarterly earnings call. A hardware solution doesn't need any additional software to protect against the vulnerabilities.
“ We're working to incorporate silicon-based changed to future products that will directly address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware. And those products will begin appearing later this year,” according to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.
The company recently promised that the vulnerabilities in all recent processors would be patched with software updates. The patches were pulled later after they caused additional issues.
Intel warns its investors for “highly dynamic circumstances” due to the processor leaks. The chip giant has been sued several times for the vulnerabilities.
Spectre and Meltdown are two security leaks that allow attackers to access sensitive data by abusing specific features of the CPU. Meltdown only affects Intel CPUs, while Spectre affects CPUs of all major CPU vendors.
In 2017, Intel saw its revenue grow with about 6% to a record annual revenue of $62.8 billion.
