It seems that Intel has managed to correct or would be in the process of correcting the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities at the silicon level, in the next Cannon Lake and Cascade Lake processors.

This year is being especially difficult in terms of processor security, since Specter and Meltdown, which were revealed on January 2, this week it has jumped that the AMD Ryzen suffer a total of 13 vulnerabilities at the silicon level. Intel above all has been the one who has suffered Specter and Meltdown, but not the only one. They have not stopped working on the development of a microcode that allows to reduce these vulnerabilities and that are combined with corrections at the Windows level, which Microsoft has been providing.

It's been a difficult months for Intel, who has released microcode for all processors in the last five years. The company is also working to ensure that this problem does not appear in future processors, of which the name has not been indicated, but that everything suggests that they would be the Cannon Lake. These Cannon Lake processors will be based on the 10nm process and will arrive at the end of the year, these being, in theory, immune to Specter and Meltdown. Along with these processors will come the Cascade Lake, an architecture for Xeon processors, intended for high performance systems, servers, Data Centers and others.

To correct these problems, a physical separation in silicon will be implemented at the chip level, through partitioning between applications and the different levels of privileged access for users. Intel has called it 'protective walls'. Specter 1, the most dangerous vulnerability, is based on being able to overcome the memory limits check, to access information, which would otherwise be inaccessible, which has been mitigated by operating system updates. Intel has said that it continues to develop patches that mitigate the problem.

Source: Anandtech