Okay, it's a little bit more nuanced than I thought.  In fact there are *three* 
different CPU hardware vulnerabilities just disclosed.  I've summarised the 
impact in this Reddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7o2i91/technical_analysis_of_spectre_meltdown/

The TL;DR version is:

- Spectre v1 affects pretty much any modern out-of-order CPU, but is relatively 
low impact.  It could potentially be exploited using JIT compilation of 
untrusted eBPF or Javascript, but can only exfiltrate data from the local 
process.

- Spectre v2 affects most recent Intel CPUs and some recent, high-performance 
ARM CPU cores, but not AMD to any significant degree.  On vulnerable CPUs, it 
allows a local attacker to exfiltrate data from privileged address space.

- Meltdown is the nasty one which Linux kernel devs have been scrambling to 
mitigate.  So far, it is known to affect only Intel x86 CPUs, due to their 
unusually aggressive speculative behaviour regarding L1 cache hits.  On 
vulnerable CPUs, it allows a local attacker to exfiltrate data from privileged 
address space.

I don't think we need to worry about it too much in a router context.  Virtual 
server folks, OTOH...

 - Jonathan Morton

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