Considering this is the second big Intel security SNAFU in 2 months… yeah…. this is big.
It impacts Google and other cloud services, who will see 30% average performance hits. It impacts almost literally every Intel CPU on the market.
This is a catastrophic fuck-up as the "bug" voids virtual memory protections. Not just virtual machines, but protected memory space used by cryptography systems and other such things that would open up the AES cyphers up to side channel attacks as bits of running code could be sniffed by a fucking Java app in a browser.
It is an absolute must-patch and is being retroactively applied into Linux patches. It's fucking huge as it impacts Intel's current line of silicon architecture. They have to go back and completely redesign their speculative execution system… or work outside of it.
It's kind of hard to over-state how "yuuge" this is.