Meltdown is not only Intel. Some ARM and Apple designed ARM processors are affected by Meltdown as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...

There are no products on the market shipping with the one ARM-designed processor affected by Meltdown.

I think that's mainly out of luck. If the exploit had been discovered two years later, the story would likely be different. Apple has been much more ambitious with their ARM processor designs and has shipping iOS and AppleTV products affected by Meltdown.

Shipping or not, it illustrates, that Intel was not unique.

Now can you argue that the given faulty design was not directly influenced by Intel conscious and deliberate bad decisions ?

I'm not sure what kind of answer you are expecting. All I am saying is that Intel is not uniquely in the wrong here. There is a whole industry of bad decisions. Whether the decisions were conscious, or only obvious in hindsight I can't say.

What’s your source for the Apple claim, as your link doesn’t support it.

"Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown. To help defend against Spectre, Apple has released mitigations in iOS 11.2.2, the macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 Supplemental Update, and Safari 11.0.2 for macOS Sierra and OS X El Capitan. Apple Watch is not affected by either Meltdown or Spectre." https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208394

Meltdown is a Variant of Spectre this isn't how Intel classifies it, this is how Google Project Zero, and heck even Intel's competitor AMD classifies it.

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/reading-pri...

It's also not the scariest variant, it's easily fixed (performance degradation aside), doesn't require a microcode update to be fixed hence is 100% software mitigated, doesn't allow you to cross between guest and host memory address spaces and isn't remotely exploitable.

On the other hand variant 1 and 2 are much scarier because they are the complete opposite of Meltdown.

Meltdown is not a variant of Spectre. Spectre itself has two variants.

And Meltdown was the easiest to exploit. Spectre is "bad" because it affects everyone, but it's less exploitable than Intel's Meltdown.

Meltdown is very much a variant of this, 3 variant exist 3.1 if you consider Meltdown on ARM.

Meltdown is the easiest to exploit and the easiest to fix it’s also the least scary one as far as compromises go.

Meltdown is a specific type of Spectre exploit.

While it's more easily exploited, it's also patchable with minimal performance impact, unlike Spectre in general.

No, it's not. Please read the website of the attacks created by those who discovered and named them: https://meltdownattack.com and https://spectreattack.com

Potentially minimal is probably more accurate. It's workload dependent. In some cases, such as frequent interrupts or system calls on older CPUs without the PCID and INVPCIB features to mitigate the cost, it can be be very expensive.