Intel’s 9th Generation Coffee Lake-R CPUs contain Spectre/Meltdown hardware fixes

This means that Intel’s Coffee Lake-R 8-core i7/i9 processors will offer hardware mitigations for Spectre Variant 3 (Meltdown/Rogue Data Cache Load) and Spectre Variant 5 (L1 Terminal Fault/Foreshadow), with other variations being mitigated by Firmware and OS-level fixes that are already available with modern BIOS files and OS updates. 

Intel’s planned 9th Generation Skylake-X refresh products will not offer the same hardware level fixes as their Coffee Lake-R-based counterparts, thanks to the fact that they use the same silicon as their 7th generation equivalents, albeit with refinements such as increased base/boost clock speeds and a soldered IHS. 

The downside of today’s Spectre firmware/OS mitigations is their performance impact, with Intel’s latest hardware-based fixes lowering the harmful effects of these side-channel remedies. Sadly, Intel has not commented on how much their hardware-level fixes have reduced these performance losses. That being said, these performance losses have been relatively unfelt within the consumer market.   

You can join the discussion on Intel’s 9th Generation Coffee lake-R silicon containing hardware level meltdown fixes on the OC3D Forums.