Nvidia Rolls Out Driver Updates to Help Protect Against Spectre Security Flaw

Meltdown and Spectre, once thought to affect only Intel Chips, are now believed to bear upon products from many chipmakers, including AMD, ARM and Nvidia, amid others.

With many software vendors and hardware manufacturers starting to push out patches in an attempt to incorporate the damage, it is now the turn of Nvidia to do the same. The famed GPU designer is now rolling out updated drivers that the visitor says will help protect against the vulnerabilities.

NVIDIA Max Q Design

Nvidia, however, disputes claims that its chips are affected by either of the exploits. The company maintains that its GPU hardware is "immune" to the speculative execution vulnerabilities detailed by Google's Project Nothing researchers last week. Which is why thisisn't a firmware update, but just a driver update"to help mitigate the CPU security issue".

Nvidia is playing it safe to brand sure in that location are no hardware issues when its GPUs interact with a recently-patched CPU. Information technology's non known whether the updates are hampering performance in any way, simply the slower Intel CPUs could cause performance bottlenecks on older machines with new GPUs.

Here'southward the consummate list of Nvidia chips that are receiving patched drivers on various platforms:

GeForce, Quadro, NVS – Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris
Tesla – Windows and Linux
Filigree – Windows, Windows Server with Hyper-Five, Linux, Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere and Crimson Hat KVM

Nvidia says further updates would exist rolled out to completely plug 'Spectre', and claims its drivers aren't affected by any known 'Meltdown' exploit.

While nigh of the driver branches accept already received the updated drivers, the few that remain volition be patched by the end of this calendar month. Users should be able to download the updated drivers from the Nvidia driver download page as and when the patched drivers become available.