Intel

Initially revealed by CEO Brian Krzanich during an analyst event in early June, Intel plans to offer its discrete GPU in just a few years, reports MarketWatch. An official Intel Twitter account confirmed the news, first by noting the 2020 target date, then by retweeting the story.

Intel's intention is to provide the discrete GPUs to enterprise and consumer markets. For enterprise, Intel wants to provide its discrete GPUs for use in data centers, powering machine learning and AI in a similar way existing GPU technology from AMD and Nvidia are used.

Apple uses its own purpose-designed CPUs for its iPhones and iPads, built around the ARM architecture. An article reported by Ian King and Mark Gurman, published by Bloomberg yesterday, says that the company wants to do the same for Macs and could start shipping computers with the new CPUs instead of Intel chips as soon as 2020.

Intel has issued fresh "microcode revision guidance" that reveals it won’t address the Meltdown and Spectre design flaws in all of its vulnerable processors – in some cases because it's too tricky to remove the Spectre v2 class of vulnerabilities.

The new guidance, issued April 2, adds a “stopped” status to Intel’s “production status” category in its array of available Meltdown and Spectre security updates. "Stopped" indicates there will be no microcode patch to kill off Meltdown and Spectre.

Shipping in the second half of this year, the next generation of Xeon Scalable Processors (codenamed Cascade Lake) will contain hardware fixes for the Meltdown attack and certain variants of the Spectre attack. So, too, will a range of processors using the same 8th generation Core branding that some processors are already using.

Earlier this year, attacks that exploit the processor's speculative execution were published with the names Meltdown and Spectre, prompting a reaction from hardware and software companies.

Intel reports that it has developed a stable microcode update to address the Spectre flaw for its Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors in all their various variants.

Intel has updated its bug bounty program, offering up to $250,000 to anyone identifying vulnerabilities in its hardware and software. The key update here is that the program is now open to everyone through the HackerOne platform -- it was previously open to selected security researchers on an invite-only basis.

In initial disclosures about critical security flaws discovered in its processors, Intel Corp. notified a small group of customers, including Chinese technology companies, but left out the U.S. government, according to people familiar with the matter and some of the companies involved.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich opened his fourth-quarter earnings call with comments on the newly discovered Spectre and Meltdown security flaws in nearly all of Intel’s processors.

He said that the company was working “around the clock with our customers and partners” to address the flaws, and he was “acutely aware that we have more to do” beyond issuing software fixes to deal with the problems.

Intel is now advising its customers and partners to halt the installation of patches for its Broadwell and Haswell microprocessor systems in the wake of recent reports of reboot problems.

Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel, today said in a post that Intel soon will be issuing a fix for the patch. In the meantime, he says customers should refrain from applying the problematic patches.

2018 greeted CIOs around the planet in quite rude fashion, following the revelation of two 20-year-old undiscovered security flaws in the chips that run their clouds and data centers last week. The patches required to fix the flaws haven’t affected everyone equally, but customers who now find themselves with workloads that run 10 percent to 20 percent slower than they did a month ago can’t be pleased.

Someone is going to have to pay for this.