A team of Google researchers working with AMD recently discovered a major CPU exploit on Zen-based processors. The exploit allows anyone with local admin privileges to write and push custom microcode updates to affected CPUs. The same Google team has released the full deep-dive on the exploit, including how to write your own microcode. Anyone can now effectively jailbreak their own AMD CPUs.
The exploit affects all AMD CPUs using the Zen 1 to Zen 4 architectures. AMD released a BIOS patch plugging the exploit shortly after its discovery, but any of the above CPUs with a BIOS patch before 2024-12-17 will be vulnerable to the exploit. Though a malicious actor wishing to abuse this vulnerability needs an extremely high level of access to a system to exploit it, those concerned should update their or their organization’s systems to the most recent BIOS update.
We’ll have to wait and see. AMD has about 31% hardware share on the Steam hardware survey (which includes the AMD driven Steam Deck of course) and Windows 10 makes up 53% of Team’s user base. Would cutting off 31% from the 44% or PC gamers really hurt their bottom line enough to not warrant anti cheating technology? It’s a significant chunk of gamers, but they’re already dropping literally most PC gamers anyway.
If AMD/Intel were close to a 50/50 split the story may be different, but unfortunately Intel still has most of the PC market share. I think gamers may be tricked into calling AMD hardware “cheater hardware” before calling out their favourite games companies.