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)
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?