Which CPU’s are exempt from Sceptre/Meltdown.

<blockquote><a href="#278973"><em>In reply to Oasis:</em></a></blockquote><p>Not really a surprise. The complexity of the changes and the amount of re-learning they will need to do is massive. They need to revisit everything they've implemented in the last 20 years or so and review and retest it.</p><p>We also have the 6 new Spectre variants that surfaced this month (2 publicly disclosed, the rest to follow).</p><p>I believe that Intel currently has something like a 2 year lead time for new chips – they might release new chips every year, but they have been in development for at least 2 years.</p><p>With these problems, they first have to stop the development of the newest generation (the one set for a 2020 release), analyse the problems that are being reported and work out where the design has gone wrong – and that is 20 years worth of knowledge they have to unlearn and look at the problem anew. </p><p>So I wouldn't expect to see anything before 2020, and I would think that that is piushing it.</p><p>It might be easier for ARM, SPARC and IBM, as their chip designs are "simpler", in that they use RISC technology, so the microcode is not so compley and you probably have a cleaner, smaller design to go through. But, again, I don't expect them to have fully resolved the problem by this time next year.</p><p>And, as noted above, now people know where to look, they are finding even more of these problems, which means that Intel are currently trying to run in quicksand. For every piece of elastoplast they stick over the cracks in their design, more cracks are appearing. So the question is also, does it make sense to fix the problems now, or should they patch the problems in current chips in the pipeline (i.e. those in the 2020 / 2022 release timeframe) and see what else comes to light, before re-designing a chip that doesn't need patches?</p>