How come this wasn't discovered sooner? It would seem to me that all the really smart people who designed super-scalar processors and all the nifty tricks that

How come this wasn't discovered sooner? It would seem to me that all the really smart people who designed super-scalar processors and all the nifty tricks that CPUs do today - would have thought that these attacks would be in the realm of possibility. If that's the case - who's to say these attacks haven't been used in the wild by sophisticated players for years now? Seems like the perfect attack. Undetectable. No log traces.