Right now one of the ways Intel is battling against the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities is through software patches. However given that there have been reports that claim that there will be a hit in performance following the patches, clearly this is a less-than-ideal situation, but Intel hopes to address that later this year.
During the company’s fourth quarter financials release, Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich promised that the company’s chips that will be shipping this year will come with actual hardware fixes that will address the vulnerabilities once and for all. However it has been pointed out that Intel does not mention when these chips will be released, and if the fixes will include the the more recent processors, such as Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, or Skylake, or if it will only cover the Cannon Lake processors.
As ArsTechnica notes, Intel also does not mention in what form the fix will take, such as whether or not the fixes will impact the performance of the chips, or if it will not affect performance at all, and so on. We suppose the fact that future Intel chips will be protected is still pretty good news, but given the lack of information available at this point, you might want to hold off on building that brand new PC at the moment, at least until Intel can confirm when these new chips will be available.