As part of today's Intel's Fall Desktop Launch event, new 9th generation CPUs were announced that include hardware protection for two of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerability variants. This information was slipped into the fine print of a slide announcing the release of Intel's new 9th Gen CPUs as can be seen below.
Previous software and microcode protections would cause a performance hit on older CPUs. With the release of these new CPUs, they are powerful enough that any performance hit caused by these protections should not be noticeable.
It has not been detailed what specific hardware changes were made add protection. BleepingComputer has contacted Intel for more information, but had not heard back at the time of this publication.
