Yes exactly. To clarify my point; this vulnerability only affects you if you're sharing a physical machine/CPU with other users (isolated by a virtualization la

Yes exactly. To clarify my point; this vulnerability only affects you if you're sharing a physical machine/CPU with other users (isolated by a virtualization layer)... So if you choose not to share your physical machines/CPUs with other users then you are not exposed to that vulnerability and ideally you also shouldn't need to get these patches and their associated performance overheads. Virtualization already has some known minor performance overheads but now these patches will add even more overheads. Can cloud providers keep pretending that 4x 2-core virtual instances are as performant as a single physical 8-core instance?