Semi-sensational headline makes it seem like they've known this for well over a year. It's been known for approx. 6 months.
>Variants of this issue are known to affect many modern processors, including certain processors by Intel, AMD and ARM. For a few Intel and AMD CPU models, we have exploits that work against real software. We reported this issue to Intel, AMD and ARM on 2017-06-01 [1].
[0] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com.es/2018/01/reading-pr...