[ceptimus]

AMD shares are up 7% and Intel shares down 4%. The CEO of Intel is rumored to have recently sold a huge part of his Intel stock. This is insider trading in some form and sucks.

There are also rumors that Intel insiders have known about the flaw for at least the last five years but have been told to keep quiet "while a solution is sought." The fact that Microsoft, Linux, and Apple have been secretly working on a work-around for the last few months probably means that Intel have now given up on the idea of fixing the problem by a processor microcode update.

There either has been, or has threatened to be, some kind of security exploit based around the hardware flaw - and the details about that were likely to leak into the public domain eventually.