1. is reversed: meltdown is intel-only. Spectre is a more generic speculation attack. 2. Apple's custom ARM chips have extensive speculative execution, and cle

1. is reversed: meltdown is intel-only. Spectre is a more generic speculation attack. 2. Apple's custom ARM chips have extensive speculative execution, and clearly their fixes for it are extremely expensive. 3. It's novel, which is why security researchers are so excited! Branching based side-channel attacks were previously only known to be able to track execution (so branch-based AES encryption was vulnerable to having its keys stolen)-- but reading arbitrary data is much stronger.