All of the above. Greater complexity/more features, people dedicated to finding vulnerabilities, more news coverage of vulnerabilities, more money to be made f

All of the above. Greater complexity/more features, people dedicated to finding vulnerabilities, more news coverage of vulnerabilities, more money to be made from exploiting vulnerabilities and general complacency from Intel. Given the lack of serious competition in the high performance space until recently, Intel figured they could get away with their rather slow and unimpressive response which basically boiled down to kneecapping recent processors and telling owners of older ones to just buy a new computer. Compare and contrast their handling of the stream of vulnerabilities in the past few years to the FDIV bug in the 90's. The FDIV bug was the first time I remember a hardware bug making national news. Intel just about shit themselves over this apologizing profusely, offering free processor swaps, billion dollar write down, talking about how this would never happen again etc. A big part of the reason they took it so seriously was that there were still a number of other alternative CPU manufacturers trying to compete with Intel at the time and it was far from certain that x86 would become the undisputed ISA for PCs. (this was pre-Windows 95) All this, and the vast majority of people would never ever experience the FDIV bug even if their processor had it. Times change, but the lesson remains the same: competition is good.