>> This kind of work is just as awesome as all the papers on CPU side-channel attacks (cache, branch prediction, etc) which really seemed to take off around 2005.

Maybe you meant late 90ies, when Kocher (and others) published results on side-channel attacks.

http://www.cryptography.com/public/pdf/TimingAttacks.pdf http://www.cryptography.com/public/pdf/DPA.pdf