In the case of Spectre/Meltdown, it's not simply a case of finding the vulnerabilities and patching them; the workarounds result in significant performance costs, and essentially mean the processors affected are now less capable than when they were sold. This incurs damages for the people whose computing is now slower / not fit for purpose, or who now have to buy more processors to meet their requirements. Openness is great, but I don't believe we should sell our guarantees for it, and put ourselves in a buyer beware situation.
Interestingly this is very similar to the case of VW Diesel engines. They were cutting corners for performance, and the cheap fix (software) incurs a performance and/or efficiency penalty of the same magnitude as the Spectre/Meltdown patches.
In that case, the outcome was significantly better for consumers in the US compared to elsewhere.
Are there any legal processes against Intel from customers?
VW intentionally misled buyers and regulators about the actual emissions of their cars. Unless Intel knew about Spectre/Meltdown when they were designing their chips, it's a pretty different situation legally speaking.
Agree. They did sell a product that doesn’t do what customers expect though, but I assume customers weren’t misled by that either simply because Intel don’t put performance figures on the boxes (and the theoretical performance is unchanged - it might be different if a manufacturer would e.g disable half the cache or cut clocks 15% to fix an honest design mistake)
