We guess that the security people at Chipzilla are crossing their claws and silently praying to the god of Big Silicon that it does not break anything and works.

For those who came in late, this is Intel's second go at patching the Spectre vulnerability, and the last fix was an embarrassment, causing more problems than it fixed.

The company said: "We are mindful of the fact that, in some cases, there are multiple mitigation techniques available that may protect against these exploits. This includes 'Retpoline,' a Google-developed mitigation technique for Variant 2."

Writing in his bog, Intel's Navin Shenoy said: "We have now released production microcode updates to our OEM customers and partners for Kaby Lake- and Coffee Lake-based platforms, plus additional Skylake-based platforms. This represents our 6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel Core product lines as well as our latest Intel Core X-series, processor family. It also includes the recently announced Intel Xeon Scalable and Intel Xeon D processors for data centre systems."

The new microcode will be made available in most cases through OEM firmware updates.

Shenoy encouraged people to always keep their systems up to date, even if the last patch stuffed up those who installed it.

There is also a comprehensive schedule and current status of planned microcode updates available online.