(Disclosure: I work at Cloudflare but wasn't involved in this decision) Spectre variant 1 still affects patched chips with any sort of speculation and the price of fixing via compiler is substantial. It's a multi vendor structural issue. The hardware industry is stuck with some very unpalatable decisions to fix this. In some cases there are tricks to protect particular arrays but it's very finicky especially if arrays aren't a power of two in length.
I wonder when these issues will be far behind us... I can’t imagine it’s very near.
>This major shift.....
Intel is still selling as many Xeon as they can make. And AMD's EPYC 2 / Datacenter revenue hasn't move up much relatively speaking.
Not only is it not major by any means, I wouldn't even agree on the word shift.
And that is speaking as someone who really want AMD to do better.
From 4Q2017 to 4Q2019 AMD's server market share increased from 0.8% to 4.5%[1].
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-intel-cpu-market-sh...
Bravo to Cloudflare!
[1] https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/linode-case-study...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabi...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabil...