I interpreted it as: Intel isn't going to fix Specter in HW (as opposed to Meltdown)
Instead, they do some crazy crazy black magic in the patches.
Instead, they do some crazy crazy black magic in the patches.
Intel will make a fix but the fix will be disabled by default as that results in the best performance numbers, those that will be reported in the media.
When you want to use the CPU in the cloud, you have to enable the fix and get much lower performance. But nobody in the media will care about that as they have the nice performance numbers and therefore Intel don't care to implement a fix with high performance.
Seems like Intel just wants to half-arse a solution.