Makes me wonder if that's Intel's PR plan (hence their spin on the story). Assuage the general consumer and mainstream media, point the finger at the OS vendors if necessary, and fix the bug in their next-gen chips.
When this all shakes out, the general story is going to be "upgrade sooner, current-gen Intel chips are x% faster", where x is going to be a larger number than it was a week ago.
It's more-or-less the Apple battery story all over again. Current devices are going to be slower, newer ones are going to be faster. Even if you know the why and the how, you're still in the same place as everybody else (at best, you could upgrade just the chip if your MB is new enough, but you're still buying Intel). Unless there's some clear way of imposing the external cost of this bug on Intel, it's a win-win for them.
Here's another potential PR spin: the major cloud vendors got out ahead of this so that they could point the finger at Intel, making customers not ask "Why did you sell me this fundamentally insecure server for so many years?"
Because this isn't really that new nor is it really a bug. Meltdown could be a bug because the asynchronous access of memory in other protection rings is unsafe, but the rest of it is just a normal side-channel attack, an abuse of otherwise-innocent data.
How much moral culpability should rest on the proprietors of software virtualization technologies that don't really safely encapsulate anything due to hardware incongruencies with the modern "sandboxed computing" model?
Surely there have been engineers over the years who've questioned the propriety of misleading users into seeing VMs as fully-encapsulated systems when the hardware just fundamentally doesn't support that type of native encapsulation. Such persons have probably spent the last several years being shunned for being old fogies overly attached to their rust buckets. It'd be interesting to hear some of their stories.
When this all shakes out, the general story is going to be "upgrade sooner, current-gen Intel chips are x% faster", where x is going to be a larger number than it was a week ago.
It's more-or-less the Apple battery story all over again. Current devices are going to be slower, newer ones are going to be faster. Even if you know the why and the how, you're still in the same place as everybody else (at best, you could upgrade just the chip if your MB is new enough, but you're still buying Intel). Unless there's some clear way of imposing the external cost of this bug on Intel, it's a win-win for them.