Security is always a tradeoff with convenience, privacy and performance among many other factors.
Linux was never about security, rather it is about freedom to make it so if you chose to.
If you chose to, you can also make it many other things.
And the developers endeavors to imbue it with sane defaults as a starting point.
Several of the High performance CPU’s by Apple as licensed from ARM are very susceptible to spectre attacks as well as plain meltdow, or a new variant of it.
The new unreleased A75 being particularly highlighted as vulnerable to Meltdown.
But honestly meltdown is the problem that’s easy to fix.
Spectre is about a fundamental problem in how we thought about speculative functions in CPU architecture and how they where ultimately implemented.
A substantial chunk of modern CPU’s performance comes from this ‘optimization’.
Since Windows Update KB4055532 I noticed some “stuttering” in youtube playback through Vivaldi.
I know for sure that it is caused by the given update as removing it resolves the issue. Am I looking at M$ Spectre fix breaking other things?
So Intel is now strongly encouraging people not to apply the spectre patches due to “Higher than expected” reboots.
We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior. For the full list of platforms, see the Intel.com Security Center site.
AMD has currently got 2 concurrent CPU design operations.
From what I know this is roughly how they work:
One team started work on Ryzen.
Once that first CPU design from one team is finalized (taped out),
a) the other team is already going through initial design of the next architecture forked from the first team.
During this the first team makes improvements to the current architecture for the “refresh” roll-out to hold out until the next re-architecture is ready.
By the time we got Ryzen, Ryzen+ was already in design and testing.
While Ryzen 3 design and node tooling (7nm) was in it’s initial R&D phase.
Someone should make a graph for how that works.
As far as I can glean from my industry rumors, Ryzen 3 is currently in R&D with fixes being mulled over.
It would be foolish to assume Intel isn’t doing something similar. But it will likely be until 2019 (if someone drops a surprise) to get fixed architectures.
EDIT for clarity:
Likely until 2019 to get fixed architecture of any CPU types. So that includes ARM, X86, Power, etc.