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> The real tragedy is that our processors try to win a bit more speed by sacrificing simplicity and therefore increasing the chances of such exploits.

This gets repeated on every thread about speculative execution exploits, but I think people who say this are underestimating how huge the difference would be. I suspect processors without speculative execution would be many times slower, not "a bit".

Unix systems protected against a physical person trying to read or modify another persons file. They did not stop programs run by the user reading the users own data unexpectedly which is now considered unacceptable but was previously the norm.

I got bad news: those systems were NOT secure