AMD releases CPU firmware and Windows 10 patches to safeguard its products against the Spectre security flaw.

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     Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer at AMD, said in a Tuesday announcement that Spectre fixes are finally available for AMD customers, who can download BIOS updates provided by PC and server manufacturers and motherboard providers. The fix requires a combination of processor microcode updates from OEM and motherboard manufacturers, as well as running the current and fully up-to-date version of Windows. MD said that its Spectre microcode updates date back to the first "Bulldozer" core products introduced in 2011. AMD's announcement coincides with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates, which include an operating system update to address Spectre. These Spectre fixes are for AMD CPUs running Windows 10 (version 1709).

     Meltdown and Spectre, are two security flaws first discovered by Google Project Zero. There are three variants of a side-channel analysis security issue in server and desktop processors. These security flaws could potentially allow hackers to access users' protected data. Meltdown breaks down the mechanism keeping applications from accessing arbitrary system memory, Spectre tricks other applications into accessing arbitrary locations in their memory. Patches for AMD processors in Windows Server 2016 is expected to be available following final validation and testing. For Linux users, AMD recommends patches for GPZ Variant 2, which were made available to Linux and have been released earlier this year.




     The Spectre and Meltdown security flaws have impacted an array of processors on the market, including those from Intel, ARM and AMD. Intel will release microcode updates for all Intel products launched in the past five years, and has announced hardware-based protections to its new chips to protect against the Spectre and Meltdown flaws. AMD states said that it's CPUs are only impacted by Spectre, not Meltdown. Papermaster posted that it is difficult to exploit Variant 2 on AMD processors.