https://www.theregister.c...intel_cpu_design_flaw/

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!  
 
PC Gamer has posted pre/post patch benchmarks showing (single user machine) performance is unaffected:
http://www.pcgamer.com/serious-intel-cpu-design-flaw-may-require-a-windows-patch-but-probably-wont-affect-gaming-performance/
 
From what I gather, this is mostly going to affect Cloud and large corporate installs (Google, Amazon, etc).
 

I believe, maybe wrongly because there’s a lot of guesswork and uninformed noise going on, that MacOS High SIerra updates may have already addressed the problem.

If so, as far as I can tell from personal experience, whatever Apple did to fix the problem seems to have made no difference to achievable latency figures or anything else. Mid 2014 i7 Retina MacBook Pro running Logic.

MacOS isn’t Windows of course but if Apple can make a patch that’s unobtrusive to users I would expect MS to be able to as well.

As you say, it seems it’s anyone with a seriously big multi-user database or server cloud who’ll see the worst of the consequences. And the people who build the server hardware using what are now known to be flawed chips.

I’d be surprised if some with deep pockets aren’t contemplating suing wither their hardware supplier or Intel. Which in the end might mean Intel get it in the neck.

What amazes me is that something as potentially serious as this goes unnoticed for a decade. At least, let’s hope it went unnoticed by those with malicious intent. It also highlights the risk of building “back doors” into operating systems to allow bypassing their security - if a back door exists, no matter how it’s hidden, someone with ill intent will find it sooner or later.

It's not just intel - "Security researchers working for Google’s Project Zero group, along with other research groups and academic institutions, have discovered a series of far-ranging security risks involving speculative execution. Speculative execution is one of the cornerstones of high-performance execution on modern CPUs, and is found in essentially all CPU designs more performant than an embedded microcontroller. As a result, essentially every last high-performance CPU on the market or that has been produced in the last couple of decades is vulnerable to one or more of a few different exploit scenarios."
 
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12214/understanding-meltdown-and-spectre
 

For the moment the things to take away from this are:
 
1) Don't panic about performance, the impact looks to be minimal to most user mode scenarios. If you aren't a sysadmin, don't worry until you see something to worry about.
 
2) Don't assume your particular processor/program/OS/whatever is "safe". At this point, there is a LOT of potential future development of this kind of exploit. It is going to be the kind of thing that will require lots of future research and work.
 
Basically as an end user, just apply security updates as soon as they come out (as you should have been doing all along) and don't worry about it unless there's a reason later.

I think most of the hoopla it is just a matter of the AMD fanboys (or AMD proper) having a schadenfreude orgasm at the expense of intel.

List of affected Intel CPUs:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3245508/components-processors/intel-responds-to-the-cpu-kernel-bug.html
 
I have seen articles where Intel is pushing out firmware updates by the end of next week for 90% of all CPU models it released in the past five years.  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/intel-promises-firmware-updates-for-most-modern-cpus-by-the-end-of-next-week/
 
I see two potential big issues with that:
 
1. If you are running older Intel hardware, such as Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge, they were released in 2011 and 2012 respectively, so are not likely to make the Intel patch cutoff.
 
2. If your board is made by anybody other than Intel, you will need to get the update through your OEM, such as Asus, Gigabyte, etc.  Good luck with that is your board is no longer supported.
 
So it may be time for me to price out a new motherboard/CPU upgrade, since I am running a 3rd Gen Ivy Bridge Intel Core system.  I have always built with Intel, but now may be a good time to check out AMD. 

And I have seen info that suggests that the OS patches are a precursor to the firmware update, and really are not going to fully mitigate the processor flaw until the hardware is updated.
 
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/list-of-meltdown-and-spectre-vulnerability-advisories-patches-and-updates/
 

On January 3rd 2018, Microsoft released emergency out-of-band updates for Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and various Windows Server versions. Though these updates help to mitigate the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities, but to be fully protected you will also need to install the latest firmware & bios updates for your computer.

 

LOL! Sounds like a Y2K error to me. Pure hype with no real consequences. I mean, who needs your PC anyway, except for the Big Brother?

^^ NSA wrote this ;)

I was an engineer who worked on Y2K.issues, we patched EVERYWHERE and it was a thankless task. The reason why Y2K didn't have "consequences" is that people like me fixed it so well you thought there was no problem. I think if that happens again I shall make sure there is catastrophic consequences somewhere just so people believe it.