Intel Says Problem in Patches for Spectre, Meltdown Extends to Newer Chips

Intel Corp’s (INTC.O) newer chips in data center computers might reboot most of the time than its normal due to the problems with the patches issued to fix the so-called Spectre and Meltdown security flaws, the company announced on Wednesday.

In a statement on Intel’s website by Navin Shenoy, general manager of the data center group, he confirmed that the patches for the security flaw will cause higher-than-expected reboot rates in Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, Skylake and Kaby Lake processors where Kaby Lake chips are the company’s most recent offering.

Intel said that they received reports that they’re security patches were causing problems in systems with its older Broadwell and Haswell chips.

Shenoy said that they had issued patches for 90% of Intel chips that were released for some years now but to clarify it, he added that the company have more work to do. He also said that expect they’re initial versions of fixes for the buggy patches to consumers by next week.

He wrote, “We have reproduced these issues internally and are making progress toward identifying the root cause.”

Last January 3, the Intel company confirmed that the Spectre and Meltdown flaws affected its chips and giving hackers the opportunity to steal information that are very much secure.

The flaw on Spectre affected almost every modern computers and laptops, including those with chips from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) and ARM Holdings.

Intel said on Wednesday how much of a performance hit the patches cause for data center customers. For common tasks only, like running website servers, the patches caused a 2% percent slowdown while for online transactions at a stock brokerage showed 4%.

Some tests confirmed that there is as much as 18% to the highest 25% for servers that store large amounts of data and are trying to retrieve it quickly. However, they didn’t give such information if how common those situations were.