[eximius]

I don't mean they're literally being sneaky. The point was, from an OS or userland perspective, it should be invisible. Besides performance, it should have no effect because it is literally breaking the CPU model by executing code it shouldn't. It fixes it by not retiring the results, but the bug is in leaving an effect that can be found.

[EgoIncarnate]

If you had said CPU designers were being sneaky it would be more obvious that you weren't being literal. By saying "Intel silently, sneakily...", it's more personal and seems as if you are being literal. It wasn't really silent either, it was well enough documented that they did speculative execution. Many many very technical and educated people from across the industry knew about this and didn't think it was an issue. They were wrong.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I don't think the problem is that speculative execution is not as invisible as it was once believed. The problem is more of awareness and documentation. If there was an option to disable speculative execution and awareness of the associated security issues from the beginning, I don't think anyone would have a problem with using it for a performance boost where it was safe to do so. The problem is there was an industry wide assumption that it wasn't a problem that turned out to be wrong.