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Meltdown is a specific type of Spectre exploit.

While it's more easily exploited, it's also patchable with minimal performance impact, unlike Spectre in general.

No, it's not. Please read the website of the attacks created by those who discovered and named them: https://meltdownattack.com and https://spectreattack.com

Potentially minimal is probably more accurate. It's workload dependent. In some cases, such as frequent interrupts or system calls on older CPUs without the PCID and INVPCIB features to mitigate the cost, it can be be very expensive.

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