AMD has maintained that its processors are immune to Meltdown and that its chip architecture made it likely that Spectre posed zero risk. However, it is still issuing updates to mitigate risk.
AMD has kept a low profile throughout the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerability crisis. It has maintained that Meltdown poses near zero risk because of the architecture of its processors, while a Spectre exploit would also be highly unlikely. However, that is not keeping the company from issuing firmware updates for its Ryzen and EPYC chips this week.
« We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat,” AMD’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster said in a blog post on the official site in reference to Spectre.
While continuing to maintain that Meltdown (Variant 3) presents no threat, he did go into some detail about how AMD is handling Spectre (Variants 1 and 2). For Variant 1:
For Variant 2, he said that the company still believes that the chip architecture employed by AMD will make Branch Target Injection difficult to exploit. But the company sees benefit in continuing to work alongside the industry:
In response to queries about the vulnerabilities affecting Radeon GPUs, Papermaster said that the chip architecture does not use speculative execution, which is the basis for the processor vulnerabilities, so there is no impact at all.
Rival Intel has been taking most of the chip heat, given that its chips are almost exclusively vulnerable to Meltdown. It has started issuing firmware updates, and expects to have 90% of its processors produced in the last five years « immune » to both vulnerabilities by January 15. The remaining 10% should be updated by the end of the month. CEO Brian Krzanich promised more transparency going forward on Intel updates and needs fixes.
