meyers.bt :
BIT_USER, I said that in regard to the previous comment because they seemed to be under the impression that we were only just beginning to take side-channel attacks in CPU designs seriously.
I know side-channel attacks aren't new, some people have also made side-channel attacks by monitoring power draw and EMI from chips too. Nearly 15 years between significant architecturally exploitable side-channels however is a surprisingly long time between discoveries for bugs that have been there all along, hence my impression that research in that direction landed on the back-burner for much of that time.
Now that the spotlight has been brought back onto them with Spectre, Meltdown and a new set of closely variants thereof mere months after the original disclosures, AMD, Intel and ARM have the whole security community scrutinizing their instruction set and architecture for new security holes to a likely unprecedented degree.