V8: A Year with Spectre
People sometimes talk about waiting for a Spectre "fix" at a hardware or software level, but it seems that the only fix is to lose Speculative execution entirely (and with it, its performance gains). On my Haswell CPU, the performance hit was about 5% in various benchmarks, although newer architectures suffer less. Given that Spectre attacks still appear to be very difficult to perform in practice, I wonder if we will start to see Speculative execution at the hardware level brought back as an option for high performance and closed environment settings.