AMD response to Spectre (they say risk for AMD chips for the two Spectre attacks is "zero, and almost-zero" because of the way their processors are designed - we'll see):
Until I see independent confirmation I suspect that's bull****, because there's no obvious fatal flaw in the processor design that Spectre requires (unlike Intel not checking for page faults during speculative execution) and the security researchers
explicitly said AMD chips are vulnerable.
Edit: every analysis of Spectre I've read basically says the same thing: it requires only speculative execution, memory caching and access to a precise timer, to bypass software bounds checks and read the entire memory space. The upshot of this is that malicious Javascript on a webpage you visit can now read passwords stored elsewhere in your browser process' memory, though I believe mitigations against this specific vulnerability have already been deployed to the major browsers.
My hot take on this, so far, is this: this won't result in any big hack-the-planet scenarios, the same way the last half dozen giant vulnerabilities present in half the computing world didn't either. The most visible effect is probably going to be a) the giant PR ****storm for Intel and their reactions to it; and b) the technical fallout from Spectre turning the world of CPU architecture upside down.
