Intel’s 14nm-based 8th generation processor “Coffee Lake” will be discontinued on June 1, 2020, including Core i3-8100 to i7-8700K and Pentium G5500 to 5600 and Celeron G4900 series.
Yesterday, Intel uploaded a new CPU microcode in the Github library, from Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake Mobile to the latest Xeon Scalable Gen 4, Xeon Max, Raptor Lake, Alder Lake, etc. have been updated.
But unfortunately, Intel only said that this update fixed an undisclosed security issue (INTEL-SA-NA), but said nothing about the specific details. Even, in this month’s security bulletin, Intel didn’t explicitly mention CPU microcode updates, nor did it make any announcements related to “Intel processors.”
Additionally, this is the first time we’ve seen Intel release a CPU microcode update for the Alder Lake N and Atom C1100 “Arizona Beach” platforms.
In view of this sudden emergency CPU microcode update, and Intel’s silence on the content of the vulnerability, we can assume that this security vulnerability is likely to be a new vulnerability discovered internally by Intel and has not yet been made public. To avoid being maliciously used, no introduction will be made.
This new CPU microcode update has landed on Linux, and Phoronix is already conducting tests to measure the performance impact of this update on Alder Lake-P and Raptor Lake processors. Windows users are expected to receive BIOS microcode updates soon.
