It doesn't have to be gross incompetence. If you pay for something and it doesn't deliver as promised, you may be entitled to a partial or full refund.
If you know that your product is flawed, do you keep selling it or will you pull it from the shelves?
To this date I can still buy broken Intel CPUs....
They knew about the flaw in June. Yet they still kept selling Coffee Lake CPUs.
If my 8700k wouldn't still be significantly faster than Amd Ryzen (or I wouldn't have to also return the MB), I would have switched to an Amd in a heart beat.
To be fair to Intel, mitigating this type of issue isn't at all trivial. If it were, it could have been fixed in a microcode update. You can't rush a chip design for something as complicated as x86_64. There are long multi-year development cycles and tons of regression tests.
With this they need to add even more tests before they can start on attacking the issues with the design.
> To be fair to Intel, mitigating this type of issue isn't at all trivial.
It's understandable that they may not have been able to mitigate it in the 8th gen CPUs in just a few months, but they also put those CPUs out on the market, advertised them, and sold them, all the while they knew of their design flaw, without saying anything about it to the unsuspecting customer.
Doesn't stop people from filing one. They already have, in fact. I agree that it shouldn't get anywhere, but I'm not as sanguine about whether or not it actually will.
Speculatively loading data across a protection boundary which is what happens in Meltdown can be argued to be incompetence or sneakiness. It certainly helps with benchmarks.
Moreover it would be hard to say "everyone is doing it" because it seems so far besides the latest ARM processors, most of the other CPU architectures don't do it.