> They're new in general - they first appeared last week and they're > being treated as if they're related to Spectre. I've yet to see any > kind of official release of them, but that seems to be par for the > course for AMD the more I hunt around for documentation. It seems > like Suse first released it, and claimed that it disabled branch > prediction, whatever that means (certainly it can't completely disable > it without tanking performance). >
From: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Branch-Prediction-Still "I reached out to AMD and on Friday heard back. They wrote in an email to Phoronix that this Zen/17h microcode update does *not* disable branch prediction. They'll be working with SUSE to re-clarify this microcode update description"
