Games hardware giant Intel has responded to recent reports of a bug and flaw in its CPUs.

This bug has the potential to let malicious programmes read protected memory, with two attack vectors - Meltdown and Spectre - being discovered. The former only seems to affect Intel CPUs, with reports that the latter is on all three.

In a post on its newsroom area, Intel said that these exploits can't corrupt, modify or delete data. Furthermore, Intel struck out at the notion that these issues were limited to its chips, saying that AMD and ARM hardware are also vulnerable.

These companies are apparently all working together to resolve these problems, but AMD has said that its CPUs aren't affected.... only for whitepapers to come out via meltdownattack.com detailing how the Spectre attack vector has been seen working on CPUs from all three firms.

Intel also claims that the 'average computer user' will not see any impact, and also says that it has patches being rolled out this coming week and that this always was the case - the firm is making a statement now in the face of what it calls "inaccurate media reports".

"Intel is committed to product and customer security and is working closely with many other technology companies, including AMD, ARM Holdings and several operating system vendors, to develop an industry-wide approach to resolve this issue promptly and constructively," the company said.

"Intel has begun providing software and firmware updates to mitigate these exploits. Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.

"Intel is committed to the industry best practice of responsible disclosure of potential security issues, which is why Intel and other vendors had planned to disclose this issue next week when more software and firmware updates will be available. However, Intel is making this statement today because of the current inaccurate media reports."