Intel, at the time of the launch of the Coffee Lake processors, would already know the existence of the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities, of which it would have been informed months before.
Meltdown and Specter, the two serious vulnerabilities in all processors on the market, regardless of the company, are leading Intel on its head, especially Intel. It also seems that Intel, when it launched the Coffee Lake processors on the market on October 5, was already aware that these eighth generation processors suffered from this vulnerability. Google's Project Zero already had the report of the Specter vulnerabilities in its variants CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715 and Meltdown CVE-2017-5754, which would have been discovered in the middle of last year and made known to the hardware manufacturers, under embargo.
This information, therefore, reached less than Intel and the competition before the launch of Coffee Lake, but possibly late, because the processors would already be in the mass production process. Basically, this vulnerability occurs in the Skylake architecture, which serves as the basis for the Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake, so previous generation processors would be exempt from this vulnerability. There are many users these days, who have told us that the Haswell architecture processors do not present the vulnerability with the software that the company has released.
One of the investigators alleges that the company, being aware, would have responsibility, knowing this information when it launched the eighth-generation processors, and that could bring a class action lawsuit against the company for putting vulnerable hardware on the market. There is more, as Skylake and later architectures would not only need an operating system kernel patch, they would also require microcode updates to address this vulnerability.
Yesterday we reported that TechSpot hadn't detected any performance differences with the Windows 10 patch, but the need for specific microcode to fix the issue would indeed cause a performance loss, despite claims from the processor company's main customers, who hadn't anticipated any performance impact. Furthermore, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich could face investor lawsuits and SEC sanctions for selling $22 million worth of stock before this vulnerability was known, thanks to his insider information. It seems the stars are aligning in AMD's favor once again.
Source: TPU