Intel may finally be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as far as patches for the Spectre vulnerability go. You might remember that a mid-January update/patch to address Spectre was identified as the cause of 'higher system reboot' frequency on Haswell and Broadwell platforms and eventually found to also afflict other Intel Core systems. Now their development team appear to have finally ironed out the causes, and have begun to deploy patches starting with Skylake-based platforms.

In his latest news update on the matter Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group Navin Shenoy revealed that a production microcode update was released to OEM manufacturers of Skylake-based systems earlier this week. The update should now be progressing though the OEM's own internal validation process ahead of a general release. Furthermore beta releases of fixed microcode patches are continually being issued to partners and consumers for other affect platforms such as Broadwell and Haswell.

The updates are likely to be distributed via OEM firmware updates which may or may not be pushed through the Windows Update process. It's up to the customer to do due diligence in searching out and applying them, especially those where vulnerability to Spectre is acute and falling prey to it could be especially damaging.

SOURCE: Intel Newsroom