Intel investigates restart problems PCs with newer CPUs after Meltdown patches

Intel has announced that it is investigating reboot issues on certain systems with newer CPUs that occur after applying Specter and Meltdown patches. At first, the company said only Broadwell and Haswell were experiencing problems.

Intel writes that it is still investigating the cause of the reboot phenomena that occur with “certain configurations, including platforms based on Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, Skylake and Kaby Lake.” It plans to make beta microcode available to manufacturers for validation purposes in the course of next week. Last week, Intel reported that it was aware of unexpected reboots on systems with Haswell and Broadwell processors.

The company also states that it has now released firmware updates for 90 percent of all Intel CPUs introduced in the last five years. It previously said it plans to patch the remaining 10 percent by the end of this month. It has not yet provided concrete information about older processors. Intel still recommends patching and says manufacturers can continue to develop patches based on the existing microcode, but be aware of reboot issues.

Finally, Intel ran benchmarks after applying the patches. Last week, the company shared preliminary results for consumers, and now it’s doing the same for data centers on Xeon systems. For example, at a CPU load of one hundred percent from write tasks, there was an 18 percent decrease in performance for I/O tasks. At lower CPU load by reading, there was almost no difference. This was also the case with integer and floating point tasks.

Consumer systems (left) and data centers