AMD Completes Initial Assessment of CTS Labs Research – Easy Fixes and No Performance Impact

On Monday, March 12, AMD was made aware of potential security vulnerabilities in several of our current generation processors. Less than 24 hours the third-party research firm, CTS Labs, issued a press release to the public. Many felt like this was a targeted attack on AMD and Reddit had a field day with it. Some believe that the whole situation was never designed to knock AMD down, but have enough of an impact for some hedge fund managers to run away with profits. Regardless of their intentions, AMD has responded to the claims today after completing n initial assessment and plan for mitigations. That blog post was written by no other than AMD CTO Mark Papermaster and can be read here.

The good news is that AMD believes that everything can be fixed with AMD Secure Processor (PSP) firmware patches and standard motherboard UEFI/BIOS updates. Those updates will be out in coming weeks and AMD does not believe they will impact performance. This is great news and we are glad that AMD’s planned mitigation actions all seem simple and won’t impact performance.