Only Intel CPUs Affected
In addition to the ‘Spectre’ and ‘Meltdown’ vulnerabilities, it was revealed two weeks ago that Intel CPUs have something else to be worried about. This time, there is a new threat experts are calling the ‘SPOILER’ exploit.
The discovery is by researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the University of Lübeck. Like Meltdown and Spectre, SPOILER affects CPUs. Specifically, all Intel generations starting from the 1st generation of Intel Core processors.
The root cause of the issue is that the memory operations execute speculatively and the processor resolves the dependency when the full physical address bits are available. Physical address bits are security sensitive information. And if they are available to user space, it elevates the user to perform other micro architectural attacks.”
The question on many users’ minds is whether this affects AMD CPUs in anyway.
What Makes AMD CPUs Immune to this Vulnerability?
AMD has since responded officially and confirms that their Ryzen CPUs are completely immune from the threat. The company attributes this to their “unique processor architecture“.
The SPOILER exploit gains access to partial address information above address bit 11 during load operations. Thankfully, Ryzen CPUs do not use partial address matches above address bit 11 when resolving load conflicts.
