Amen -- and thank you. Of these, the Meltdown paper is especially well-written. One of my laments of this whole fracas is that Spectre has drowned out Meltdown

Amen -- and thank you. Of these, the Meltdown paper is especially well-written. One of my laments of this whole fracas is that Spectre has drowned out Meltdown to a degree (and not without good reason). But Meltdown is in fact the much more egregious of the two: it represents an indisputable flaw in Intel's architecture; the system software work to workaround it is gnarly (and, depending on implementation choices made, potentially rife with serious performance side-effects); and exploits are readily available. This is not to minimize Spectre which is serious and difficult to mitigate, but rather to counter some of the implicit minimization of Meltdown. Point is: keldaris is exactly right; please do read these papers -- and read them in the order of Meltdown before Spectre. If you completely understand the Meltdown paper, the Spectre paper will be much more accessible.