Intel: All recent CPUs to get patched by end of the month

Over at CES 2018, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told the audience that his company intends to provide security updates all of its recent processors by the end of the month. Krzanich said Intel is on track to patch 90 percent of the processors it made in the past five years by the end of this week. The remaining 10 percent should get Meltdown and Spectre patches in the coming weeks. It's unknown when or if older CPUs will get patched.

He also stressed that the performance impact heavily depends on the workload. Tests performed by PC sites reveal that for the average user or gamer, the performance impact is very minimal. Only disk performance sees a pretty big hit.

"We believe the performance impact of these updates is highly workload dependent," Krzanich said, referring to claims that processors may be slowed by as much as 30 percent as a result of the fixes. "We expect some may have a larger impact than others, so we'll continue working with the industry to minimize the impact on those workloads over time."

Krzanich also mentioned there's no evidence so far of hackers using the vulnerabilities to steal data.