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I think speculation... Is just not in the cards for most use cases.

Yes you can isolate cores and you can encrypt the data and use enclaves and all that with much effort and complexity and overhead might eventually fix the 90th percentile but in the end the core issue is simply the nature of speculation as a strategy to improve cpu performance.

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IMO it’s the reverse. Not having speculation absolutely cripples processor performance. For most use cases, it’s clearly better to have the performance but accept the risk of these vulnerabilities.

In the cases for which this is not true we need to selectively lock down speculative execution.

Why is the issue speculative optimization, not unsafe code? We know what unsafe code is, remote code, code loaded from unknown sources, etc., so those can be segregated at a cost, while safe code runs with efficiency. If it's about unsafe code slipping through due to misclassification, well, there are more vulnerabilities than the processor.

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