AMD confirms that its CPUs are exposed to all variants of Spectre - promises patches ASAP

No Meltdown at AMD, but company admits vulnerability to Spectre flaw

AMD has confirmed that its processors are exposed to both variants of the Spectre security flaw, but reiterated that its CPUs are immune to the Meltdown flaw that largely affects only Intel microprocessors.

When news of the chip-architecture vulnerabilities was released last week, the chip designer said its devices were only affected by one of the Spectre flaws and claimed that the risk of exploit was "near zero".

But on Thursday, the company released a statement changing its stance and revealed that its products are likely to be vulnerable to both varients of the Spectre flaw.

However, AMD added that it believed that "AMD's processor architectures make it difficult to exploit Variant 2... We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat."

The statement continued: "AMD will make optional microcode updates available to our customers and partners for Ryzen and EPYC processors starting this week. We expect to make updates available for our previous generation products over the coming weeks."

For the past week, some of the world's biggest technology companies have been rushing to issue bug fixes to mitigate the threat posed by Meltdown and Spectre, CPU architecture flaws that could enable attackers to steal sensitive data, such as passwords and banking details, from users' PCs.

While no exploit has been observed in the wild, operating system makers and chip vendors have been rushing to devise software-level patches to keep users secure. However, these may come with a performance hit.

The flaws affect virtually all computing devices running on chips manufactured by Intel, AMD and ARM, although the worst - called Meltdown - largely just affects Intel. Apple, Canonical and Microsoft are among the companies that have already issued fixes.

When AMD originally announced that it's products weren't greatly affected by the flaw, its shares increased in value by nearly 20 per cent. The latest admission has seen a small fall, of around four per cent, according to Reuters.