Spectre relies on tricking the CPU into branch predicting its way into accessing protected memory, no? Is it not possible that we can keep most of the performance benefits of speculative execution by somehow having a built in "Hey, never ever speculate that I'll want to access this region of memory" sort of thing?
I read an ars technica article that this would be a possible solution but isn’t right now because the hardware to check access rights isn’t fast enough yet