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That would only be valid as a short-term strategy.

And for Intel these bugs go back to the first Pentium Pro in 1995, their first out-of-order speculative execution design. Very cunning of them, along with IBM two years earlier, the SPARC bunch starting that year, MIPS and AMD a year later, and recently ARM as it targeted higher performance to follow the same exactly "strategy".

Or maybe it was an industry blind spot, now a very big deal because so many of these CPUs run other people's random code, JavaScript in browsers, and anything and everything in shared cloud hosts.

I don't know about Fujitsu but Sun's SPARC designs were free from speculative execution until Oracle bought them.

Or did no one bother to check the older designs??

Oops, didn't read your comment closely enough, strike my above comment.

Followed the Wikipedia link to the 1995 Fujitsu/HAL out-of-order design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_SPARC64) and it says it's superscalar, but then that the first version can execute as many as 4 instructions at once and out-of-order. And from the very first version had branch prediction, which equals speculative execution as far as I know.

Prophetic words : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos

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