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The cores in (all versions of?) Raspberry Pi do speculatively execute. It's just that the window of opportunity is tiny - just a few cycles (and maybe up to twice that many instructions) - and there's (probably) no way to get an indirected side-effect.

I wouldn't write off the ability to get a useful side-effect signal. The variants widely documented are not the only possible methods of inducing speculative side-effects.

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Yes, the Raspberry Pi will issue loads before the branch resolves. But usually a processor's pipeline won't be laid out in such a way that the AGU won't have time to pass an address to the load pipe before the branch resolves and squashes the load. The Cortex A8 was an interesting exception but it was pretty deeply pipelined compared to most in order cores.

Plus, the Raspberri Pi does have a BTAC (Branch Target Access Cache). Part of Spectre uses the fact that in many architectures the branch target cache is shared across the kernel/user boundary to create a side channel.

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