In what’s unfortunately turning into a big disaster for Intel — security issues aside — in rushing with a fix for the Spectre flaws, the company has discovered and now identified the cause of random restarts in systems that have installed the microcode update.
As a result Intel is now recommending all users of Haswell and newer platforms to stop installing current microcode or firmware updates. Instead a new patch that is nearly ready for systems with those CPUs will be offered to manufacturers soon. That means OEMs and component vendors will have to go through QA testing again for each of their products before the new update reaches end users.
