And this is why computing monocultures are bad, because the dominant architecture may have painted itself into a corner.

That's why alternatives like Open POWER are important.

No, these sorts of faults can occur in any high performance chip. Intel is bearing the brunt only because they're the fastest. But Meltdown also affected an Apple core if I recall correctly and Spectre nailed them all.

This isn't as simple as "Intel/x86 sucks, let's go use SPARC". The causes run much deeper and the necessary fixes may or may not be architecturally elegant or simple.

RISC-V is far more promising than OpenPOWER ever was.

https://millcomputing.com ?

Last I checked, the Mill is vaporware. They have some interesting patents, a private simulator, parts of a compiler toolchain, and that's it. At least with OpenPOWER and RISC V, you can buy processors and even complete systems.

Are they alive? No news in the last six months…