After reading more of the (limited, publicly known) details, it looks like the data leaked isn’t, strictly speaking, total garbage. But I do wonder whether Intel got a meaningful latency improvement by putting potentially wrong data into the pipeline instead of using zeroes or stalling. Zeroes or a stall would require knowing that the data is invalid before continuing with execution, which could be a performance issue.

Your not, but the gentlemen your replying to is. Bet you can’t guess where and what he worked on?

Not sure how to read this, but if you meant it as a personal attack that's totally not ok here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not sure how to read this either, but as a moderator if you strive to warn people on ambiguity you can’t discern I can assure you no harm intended per the rules cited

Yup, I worked for a bit at Intel, but I don't speak for them, I wasn't involved in any of the designs under discussion, and everything I'm saying here is public knowledge in the computer architecture community. I figured that the perspective from the academic comparch world might be interesting.

Hehehehe I love it! Thank you much. I was being a bit rousing/ambiguous as your commentary caught my attention and was a bit excited when I checked out your background.