Re: Look at the dates ...
Yes, you should be asking about the dates. Click on the link in The Register's article with ARM's response: "a white paper and mitigation code". Note the phrase "Cache timing side-channels are a well-understood concept in the area of security research and therefore not a new finding." Well I guess ARM would say that as they are largely unaffected.
Now try searching Google for "Flaw in Intel chips could make malware attacks more potent" and read the ARS Technica article and note the date - 2016:
"Modern CPUs rely on the branch predictor to speed up operations by anticipating the addresses where soon-to-be-executed instructions are located. They speculate whether a branch is taken or not and, if taken, what address it goes to. The buffers store addresses from previous branches to facilitate the prediction. The new technique exploits collisions in the branch target buffer table to figure out the addresses where specific code chunks are located."
Sound familiar?
It should be - search for "Daniel Gruss" in Google and you will note he has worked on Prefetch Side Channel attacks as far back as 2016, oh, and also Meltdown and Spectre!
Don't you find this rather strange that it was "discovered" by Google in mid 2017? Why were we not patching as far back as 2016? The cynic in me can't help thinking that this may have suited certain security agencies for this not to be patched... or was it not disclosed because of the innevitable fall out on Intel... and I suppose Intel's CEO just happened to get really lucky selling all those stocks too...
Then there's Google. Most Google products run on ARM and not Intel. Their new Fuchsia OS first appeared on Github in August 2016. This OS has a microkernel - Zircon (previously Magenta). I wonder if this OS is vulnerable to Meltdown or Spectre?
Google's project zero is more political than it is for finding and fixing security problems. How many times has Google publicly released Microsoft vulnerabilities in the past before Microsoft has had a chance to patch them? CVE-2017-0037 is just one example.
I wonder who could possibly benefit if Microsoft and Intel were publicly discredited? Hmmm....