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With Meltdown and Spectre now unveiled and out in the wild, focus has shifted on how to contain the problems they represent and not tank CPU performance in the process. Different vendors have released their ain statements — Intel is hit the hardest by Meltdown, ARM has some limited vulnerability, then on — but AMD has stayed pretty quiet, apart from its initial argument last calendar week.

Today, the company published an update to its previous guidance, with more than specific information. AMD continues to country information technology's immune to Meltdown (Variant 3), the assail that specifically hits Intel the hardest, writing: "We believe AMD processors are non susceptible due to our utilise of privilege level protections within paging compages and no mitigation is required."

Variant i (Premises Bank check Bypass, Spectre) is a problem AMD believes can be mitigated through software. This appears to be the patch that bankrupt AMD systems; AMD says, "We are working closely with them [Microsoft] 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 calendar week."

Athlon

Socket A bringing it back — anybody got some scotch tape and a pencil?

When MS and AMD referred to these bugs as affecting onetime chips, they weren't kidding. Assuming AMD properly gave its ain total brand names in each case, equally they did with the Turion X2 Ultra, AMD's Athlon is over a decade former, as is the original Opteron brand. These references could feasibly refer to newer cores, but even the Turion X2 Ultra turns ten this year. Owners of Ryzen or even Piledriver-derived hardware don't seem to have much to worry nigh.

As for Variant 2 (Branch Target Injection, the variant MS believes has the greatest risk of harming performance), AMD continues to believe the visitor's architecture makes information technology difficult to exploit. AMD is distributing microcode updates and MS has OS patches to coming to brand this upshot harder to leverage for system attacks. Once again, no functioning impact information has been published.

AMD'south overall position in this statement is consequent with its previous guidance on Jan 3rd. The visitor stated and so that vulnerability to Variant 2 had not yet been demonstrated on an AMD organisation. The company'southward new language, which states that Variant ii is "difficult" to exploit, represents a departure from its previous bulletin. Simply with no context for how like shooting fish in a barrel or difficult the exploit might be, we can't gauge the size of the shift or the new relative adventure.