Expectations of hardware are indeed higher than for software, but isn't it a valid trade-off for Intel to make as long as most of the issues can be fixed with a microcode update? On Windows, it's updated via Windows Update, and on most Linux distributions, a package exists for CPU microcode. Most users have an easy—if not automatic—way to obtain the updates.

I believe the main issue with formally verifying everything is that reasoning about parallel code is extremely hard and might well make the entire endeavour unattainable. It would be great to have formally verified CPUs, though.

> They could've caught and fixed this one with some more testing, before actually releasing.

Isn't this true of any bug?