I doubt Intel will be lowering their prices, or refunding anyone a portion of the price of their previously purchased CPUs, that's for sure.
Look what happened after the VW diesel scandal ('dieselgate'): VW had to pay for repairs, and pay buyers (my friend bought one of the cars and got about $6k IIRC). Some people even went to jail.
Intel (or any other CPU maker) will probably not suffer similar fates. This situation is a bit different, because they may not have known about the problem. Still, everyone who bought a CPU is going to get a 10-30% performance haircut because they made a mistake. And Intel isn't going to have to pay for it.
Volkswagen deliberately engineered their cars to falsify government emission tests. What intel did was negligent. Volkswagen was malicious. These are very different. I don’t see them in remotely the same boat.
Per dictionary.com, the legal definition of negligence is "the failure to exercise that degree of care that, in the circumstances, the law requires for the protection of other persons or those interests of other persons that may be injuriously affected by the want of such care. "
What Intel did was not recognize that a specific attack possibility existed. Nobody else recognized it either, for a decade. That's not negligence. That's failure to be omniscient.
But haven't there been references thrown around that show they knew at least a couple of years and could also have known for 10 years, if there weren't busy not understanding what their bottom line depended upon them not understanding.
Look what happened after the VW diesel scandal ('dieselgate'): VW had to pay for repairs, and pay buyers (my friend bought one of the cars and got about $6k IIRC). Some people even went to jail.
Intel (or any other CPU maker) will probably not suffer similar fates. This situation is a bit different, because they may not have known about the problem. Still, everyone who bought a CPU is going to get a 10-30% performance haircut because they made a mistake. And Intel isn't going to have to pay for it.