Today we’re taking a look at the impact addressing the Spectre 'Variant 4' CPU flaw has on Intel's 8th-gen Core CPUs (Coffee Lake). Back when the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities were made public in early 2018 we knew this was going to be an ongoing process.

The initial patches didn’t take care of everything. They addressed Variant 1 better known as Meltdown and then two Spectre flaws known as Variant 2 and 3. Recently though Intel and Microsoft rolled out updates to address Variant 4, a related “speculative execution” attack dubbed “Speculative Store Bypass.”