BIOS Updates Begin Appearing For New Intel Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities

[Alex/AT]

That's because AMD never makes mistakes when it comes to designing CPU's.

As if. Half-modular FX was one crazy mistake by itself.
Although I perfectly sit myself out on it till Zen came.

The thing that they did not cheat out on validating memory accesses PL in speculative path ("Meltdown" source) to shave memory access latency came out as a pleasant surprise though indeed.

[arQon]

This is really frustrating with my 8+ year-old motherboards that probably won't get an update or if they do it's years late.

8+ years?! I'd be surprised to see a BIOS update for anything more than *3* years old, 5 at the absolute extreme. (And the 5 is for server hardware, MAYBE). The margins on consumer-grade gear are so thin that, like phones, anything over even just 18 months or so counts as "good" - and the only thing that changes after the first 6 months or so is updates for RAM compatibility etc, not anything substantive.

AMD boards probably do slightly better in that regard, since AMD are capable of designing a socket that actually lasts more than a single generation. For Intel gear though, the constant required churn of new boards for every new CPU means only the most recent product line gets any support, even for screwups like total remote compromise via the IME etc.