Slowly but steadily Intel has have been able to plug more processors and protect them against the Spectre vulnerabilities, patches for Kaby Lake (Core ix 7000) and Coffee Lake (Core ix 8000) now have been made available as well. Meltdown was already plugged at OD level.

That means that there will be firmware updates soon for many motherboards with proper microcode patches. Broadwell, Haswell, Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge all remain at bèta status.

-- Intel -- 

Based on these efforts, we have now released production microcode updates to our OEM customers and partners for Kaby Lake- and Coffee Lake-based platforms, plus additional Skylake-based platforms. This represents our 6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel® Core™ product lines as well as our latest Intel® Core™ X-series processor family. It also includes our recently announced Intel® Xeon® Scalable and Intel® Xeon® D processors for data center systems.

The new microcode will be made available in most cases through OEM firmware updates. I continue to encourage people to always keep their systems up-to-date. There is also a comprehensive schedule and current status for planned microcode updates available online.

We are mindful of the fact that, in some cases, there are multiple mitigation techniques available that may provide protection against these exploits. This includes “Retpoline,” a Google-developed mitigation technique for Variant 2. For those interested in more information on Retpoline and how it works, we recently published a new white paper. Google has also posted information about Retpoline.

I look forward to sharing additional updates soon. Again, I extend my sincere appreciation to all Intel customers and industry partners for their ongoing support.

Intel makes Spectre fixes for Intel Kaby and Coffee Lake available