Re: so, er...
I'm not disagreeing with you. But what I was really commenting on here was the *journalism*, not Intel's quote.
The Intel quote isn't new - it's been quoted and referenced tons of times, including in at least three Reg articles. So anyone who's paying attention has already seen it. El Reg has also already explained, more than once, how it's more than a tad disingenuous. So when El Reg prints a *new* article, includes the quote *again*, and surrounds it with text like:
"The patches being put in place to address the Meltdown and Spectre bugs that affect most modern CPUs were supposed be airy little things of no consequence. Instead, for some unlucky people, they're anchors."
that reads to me like El Reg is suggesting something new - either that they can now somehow show that far more cases are going to affected than we previously thought (i.e. there are, for some reason, more syscall-dependent workloads out there than had previously been realized), or that Intel had claimed that the fixes wouldn't significantly affect performance for *anyone*.
Yet in the end the article does neither - it just adds some random field reports of what we essentially already knew, i.e. that there *is* a significant performance impact on syscall-dependent workloads.
That's not valueless, but it doesn't really pay off such a dramatic introduction, or justify the "airy little things of no value" line. That's what I was questioning.