nostr:npub1z4ppnl4myf7dr30t6lhdah3d7apdtsa5skwj0lttjl08flyn97rs0z4u3u >I think we should seriously consider whether the performance improvement is really worth the constant security & correctness issues.

If CPUs were made without speculative execution, I estimate that CPUs would be 80% slower - not really a problem for decently written software, but a massive problem for what proprietary software writers and web-developers put out.

Theoretically you could do speculative execution securely if you didn't cut corners and made it impossible to recover information from mispredictions - but that would be quite a bit slower, so CPU manufacturers won't do that.

Really, attacks seem to only be a problem if you're running proprietary malware on your computer - if you don't do that, you're pretty safe.