Intel has announced that it will be making hardware adjustments to its processor line up in order to permanently fix the problematic Spectre and Meltdown bugs which have been discovered in so many of its chips in recent months. The changes are expected to take place at some point in late 2018, though the chip giant hasn't been forthcoming about specific dates.
Most often when a bug is discovered in some software or a piece of hardware, the impact is limited to a specific version from a specific release, at a specific time or place. Not so with Spectre and Meltdown, two bugs which were discovered in every single Intel CPU released since 1995 and in many AMD chips from the past decade too. It's meant that fixing it up so the problem no longer exists is unlikely to ever happen to the extent that the two manufacturers would want, though they have pushed Microsoft and Apple to release fixes, as well as more general chipset and BIOS updates from the motherboard manufacturers.
A more permanent fix however, would be if the chips themselves didn't actually have the bugs in the first place. That's what Intel is now promising will be the case with its next chip iteration, expected at some point before the end of the year.
What will be interesting to see though, is how this affects chip operation. A core problem with these bugs is that fixing them effectively slows down modern (and especially older) CPUs. If Intel is fixing the problem at the hardware level, it may impact the way the chips operate, though TechPowerUp claims that it should be possible to see Intel change the micro-architecture of its CPUs while still offering the benefits of "modern branch-prediction and speculative execution."
