Hardware mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre are the real heroes here, and the main reason I've been holding off on building a new machine. Once I can find the ninth gen stuff without being bled dry on cost, I'll be building with these.
"What makes this a little different are the eight-core products. In order to make these, Intel had to create new die masks for the manufacturing line, as their previous masks only went up to six cores (and before that, four cores). This would, theoretically, give Intel a chance to implement some of the hardware mitigations for Spectre/Meltdown. As of the time of writing, we have not been given any indication that this is the case, perhaps due to the core design being essentially a variant of Skylake in a new processor. We will have to wait until a new microarchitecture comes to the forefront to see any changes."
> * Speculative side channel variant Spectre V2 (Branch Target Injection) = Microcode + Software
> * Speculative side channel variant Meltdown V3 (Rogue Data Cache Load) = Hardware
> * Speculative side channel variant Meltdown V3a (Rogue System Register Read) = Microcode
> * Speculative side channel variant V4 (Speculative Store Bypass) = Microcode + Software
> * Speculative side channel variant L1 Terminal Fault = Hardware
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/spectre-and-m...