[skolsuper]

What about the incentive to release "the most secure chips on the market", are you discounting that a bit too much?

Granted that human nature tends to mean these factors don't have a high enough weight, e.g. it's not the safest airplanes that sell the most, it's the cheapest ones that meet the regulations, and the regulations drive safety improvements, for the most part

[Panzer04]

I guess there's probably some margin in it - if both parties seem about equally vulnerable, there's not much lost. You could expend a lot of effort into security, but the nature of these bugs is still that they are fairly rare, often require pretty significant hurdles, etc. The mfg. could probably spend a lot more money and find a few extra bugs, but who knows if they would have turned into "real" exploits?

Remember that this particular bug isn't actually present on the newest chips either - and 12th/13th gen were shipping before Intel was informed of this bug - so it was fixed eventually, probably incidentally as a result of design changes.

The unknown factor is how much additional money you'd have to invest to gain additional security, given how esoteric many of these bugs are.