When the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities news came out, the mostly effected were the Intel chips. At that time the company in a statement confirmed that it will be pushing out fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities for the effected processors.
But today the company in an statement has changed the microcode confirming that it won’t be possible for the company to provide a fix for the Meltdown and Spectre for older processors with some chips.
The company says that after comprehensive investigation of the microcode, the company has decided not to release microcode updates for the below products. The company has already assigned the “Stopped” status to 10 product families which cover more than 200 different processor models.
The reasons, Intel mentions is due to some micro architectural characteristics, limited commercial available system software support and customer inputs. These are the main reasons behind Intel putting a stop status to some of the old processor models.
Intel also specifies that most of the administrators use the processors with the chips without Internet which lets them to not expose the processors to any kind of vulnerabilities or attacks. In such cases, Intel says they don’t feel a need to push security patches for such chips since they are not exposed to any attacks.
Hence the company has decided to put a stop status for such processors and will not be pushing any fix for them going forward. The product series which have received the Stopped status from Intel are Clarskfield, Gulftown, Harpertown Xeon C0 and E0, Jasper Forest, Penryn/QC, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale C0, M0, Wolfdale E0, R0, Wolfdale Xeon C0, Wolfdale Xeon E0, Yorkfield, and Yorkfield Xeon.
Intel has already announced its new set of i9 processors for laptops which will be free from any vulnerabilities and are already protected against any attacks and are the first to come without the Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities.
