Comeback kid AMD announced on its quarterly earnings call that it intends to have a silicon fix for the variant 2 of the Spectre exploit, the only one of the Meltdown and Spectre exploits it’s vulnerable to, by 2019 with its new Zen 2 core.

The company also said it will ramp up GPU card production to meet the insane demand these days thanks to cryptominers, although it said the biggest challenge will be to find enough memory to make the cards.

It's hard to believe that in 2018 we are seeing such shortages in computing hardware, but there you have it.

It was an upbeat earnings call for AMD for once. Fourth quarter revenues came in at $1.48 billion and non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.08 per share, beating estimates for $1.41 billion and $0.05, respectively. Revenue grew 33 percent over the prior-year period, and in that same period the company saw a penny per share loss. So, the new Zen core is bringing some bliss to AMD’s finance department.

AMD had significantly lower exposure to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities than Intel because it did not use the branch prediction method Intel uses and where the exploit lies. It’s only real vulnerability was to variant 2 of Spectre, and even there the company says risk is minimal.

Nevertheless, CEO Lisa Su told analysts on the earnings call, “We continue to believe that Variant 2 of Spectre is difficult to exploit on AMD processors. However, we are deploying CPU microcode patches that in combination with OS updates provide additional mitigation steps. Longer term, we have included changes in our future processor cores, starting with our Zen 2 design, to further address potential Spectre-like exploits.”

The current core generation that has turned AMD around is known as Zen. This year, the company is believed to release a Zen+ core with new chips, focused primarily on performance improvements, which should be something because Zen already performs incredibly well.

By: DocMemory
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