That's a great article.

I do worry sometimes that something is up with CPU development, that we're tending towards more and more complicated designs with workflows that are very hard to analyse and simulate even for the designers themselves, but the actual workload execution ability performance per core isn't shifting upwards all that much, and then weird mitigations have to be applied that reduce that execution ability in practice.

Something makes me think that perhaps a different design paradigm should prevail, with particular attention paid to segregation of workloads and of core partitioning, perhaps an abandoning of hyperthreading and even to the extent of having 100% physical separation of cores and their caches.

But I'm very much not an expert in the field.

A little birdie inside of me every now and then wakes up and whispers 'is it a coincidence that these design paradigms are yielding so many vulnerabilities?'