1/ One of the more silly/flighty things claim about the Meltdown/Spectre attacks is that they will necessitate a "recall" of CPUs. That's like recalling airplanes to make them of thick steel instead of thin aluminium.
2/ There are no "bugs" here. The flaw isn't in the implementation, but of a well known design that goes back to the 1960s - a design that all major microprocessors are based on.
3/ There is no way to "fix" it without going backwards on design to make processors significantly slower than they are today. Nobody wants slower processors, so they aren't going to get "fixed".
4/ It appears you can already fix things like Spectre by turning off "branch prediction" in many CPUs -- the "fix" that CPU makers would do in order to "recall" their processors.
5/ The silly people overstate the hacker's ability to exploit these bugs with mitigations in place. No, hackers aren't going to be exploiting other people's VMs by buying 5 minutes of cloud computation.
6/ It's proper to short Intel's stock: they are going to have to delay new product releases in order to go back to the drawing boards and fix fundamental design issues. But Intel's not going to do a "recall".
7/ Whatever mitigations CPU vendors come up with will be in concert with software changes. "Page table isolation" is an overnight redesign of all operating systems. It's here to stay. The next step is for Intel CPUs to fix its performance cost.
