AMD launches Spectre Patch for its Own Processor

While Intel is at the center of the Spectre/Meltdown fiasco, AMD's chips are also affected by the CPU flaws. Though AMD insisted Meltdown Flaw pose little threat to their own products and are likely to be protected from Spectre due to the architecture. That's largely because, as the chipmaker explained an initial statement, there is a "near zero risk" to its processors. Still, AMD launches Spectre patch updates for its Ryzen and EPYC chips this week.

"We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat,” AMD's Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster said in a blog post on the official site in reference to Spectre.

At present, Linux vendors have also rolled out fixes.

For Variant 1, Mark shares some detail about how AMD is handling Spectre in the blog：

• We believe this threat can be contained with an operating system (OS) patch and we have been working with OS providers to address this issue. 

• Microsoft is distributing patches for the majority of AMD systems now. We are working closely with them to correct an issue that paused the distribution of patches for some older AMD processors (AMD Opteron, Athlon and AMD Turion X2 Ultra families) earlier this week. We expect this issue to be corrected shortly and Microsoft should resume updates for these older processors by next week. For the latest details, please see Microsoft’s website. 

• Linux vendors are also rolling out patches across AMD products now.

For Variant 2, he said that the company still believes that the chip architecture employed by AMD will make Branch Target Injection difficult to exploit. But the company sees benefit in continuing to work alongside the industry:

• AMD will make optional microcode updates available to our customers and partners for Ryzen and EPYC processors starting this week. We expect to make updates available for our previous generation products over the coming weeks. These software updates will be provided by system providers and OS vendors; please check with your supplier for the latest information on the available option for your configuration and requirements.

• Linux vendors have begun to roll out OS patches for AMD systems, and we are working closely with Microsoft on the timing for distributing their patches. We are also engaging closely with the Linux community on development of “return trampoline” (Retpoline) software mitigations.

When asked whether the exploit would affect the Radeon GPU, Mark said Speculative Execution is the basis of possible attack, but chip architecture did not have used Speculative Execution, so it’s clear that Radeon GPU will not be affected.

 Source from neowin.net