The tech industry in general undervalues security (at least in my opinion). I agree part of the reason Intel does is about being a monopolist, but I see this as a bigger trend of fancy/shiny/innovative at the expense of solid/secure/stable.
I would argue that tech people overvalue security, since they think about what could happen if you're violated, and then they discuss the expected value of making the secure decision.
But Intel has stalled out pretty hard on fancy/shiny/innovative. They hit a brick wall with 7nm.
But you can still speed things up with shiny tricks like speculative execution...
...and here we are.
Speculative execution (Branch Prediction) is hardly flashy. It's been present in Intel chips (Pentium) (and just about everyone else) since the early 90s (a quarter of a century ago). This was back when die resolution was 600 nm.
Right, my point was that they're doing more than just reducing the nm.