Intel Ice Lake to be first generation with hardware-level protection against Meltdown and Spectre

Some fresh details about Intel's Cannon Lake platform were discovered in documents related to the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities. First up, Intel confirms that this design will not feature hardware-level protection against Spectre or Meltdown. This is because the 10nm Cannon Lake chip got taped out a long time ago, this product was supposed to hit the market in 2016 but got delayed numerous times due to issues with Intel's 10nm node.

Cannon Lake is basically a die shrink of Kaby Lake, with better power efficiency, increased performance, and AVX-512 instructions set support. The first mobile Cannon Lake CPUs are expected to hit the laptop market later this year.

TechARP discovered some fresh details about the Cannon Lake-U (CNL-U) processors:

The shorthand numbers appear to indicate that :

they are ultra-low power mobile processors, with a 15 W TDP

the (2+2) model is a dual-core processor with an Intel GT2 integrated graphics

the (2+0) model is a dual-core processor without integrated graphics

The first new generation from Intel with hardware-level hardening against Spectre and Meltdown will be the future 10nm Ice Lake architecture.