Their direct customers? Yes, but alternatives are thin on the ground. Their investors? No. This bland corporate blame dispersal is exactly the kind of language

Their direct customers? Yes, but alternatives are thin on the ground. Their investors? No. This bland corporate blame dispersal is exactly the kind of language that investors are used to reading all the time, and that will placate professional investors enough to avoid a bloodbath. Techies who understand how bad this is don't have the PR skills or reputation to counter, because even most smart business/money people don't have the background or patience to understand the theoretical implications. Partial analogies and shrill responses don't have much effect as people are very used to techies getting passionate and upset about all kinds of things that they never feel the effects of. At the end of the day, short of widespread hacking with economic consequences, there won't be enough visible impact for investors to be bothered. If and when that happens Intel will deal with it, they really have no upside to do anything but spin the current situation in the most positive light. The more interesting question is what kind of design changes they make in future designs. Because F00F was a trivial fix compared to this, and as far as I know there hasn't been a security revelation of this impact for CPU design in the modern era. You'd have to go back to a time when things were much simpler and easier to change anyway. If Intel engineering doesn't take this seriously and we see half-baked mitigations in new chips that's when I go long on the competition, because that indicates true incompetence whereas the current statements indicate nothing other than savvy PR.