Well if they didn't change the socket every year...

Realistically though, they might be able to do it for cpu's that aren't soldered on (think just about every laptop) made in the last year or two, but would they really fab new versions of 10 year old cores? Its not like many of those lines are even running anymore, so they would basically have to redesign/layout and reverify everything.

Probably easier/cheaper just to send everyone a new machine.

Or give a price break on future hardware. The fix is turning out to be incredibly expensive for ordinary users, virtualization vendors, hardware vendors, OS providers, cloud providers, etc.

This incident demonstrates why you really don't want catastrophic bugs in the CPU. The fact that the hardware vendors missed this one makes you wonder what else is out there.

>Or give a price break on future hardware

feels like this would happen:

>intel agrees to give consumers a $30 price break in response to meltdown/spectre

>in other news, intel raises the prices of next generation CPUs by $30

Make it $60 and I'll take that, all the better for them to get undercut by AMD.