Re: Spectre?
"Frankly, I'm hoping AMD will now casually wander into the server market as well, where performance per watt matters as much as just the raw performance in itself"
Seems more likely to happen than it was a couple of years ago... Some folks who consume a huge amount of compute have noticed a drop in "per-core" throughput on the Xeon boxes across three generations in a row that isn't being offset by "TurboMode", cache size increases, or the increase in cores per cubic foot. Some of it is down to poorly tuned code, some down to chip errata, and to matters even more fun the performance varies pretty wildly from box to box or even run to run on the same box. Makes tuning very tiresome for everyone involved, and all the effort that goes into tuning new boxes to make them nearly as quick as the ones they replaced isn't going down well.
The "stable performance" thing is critical for big workloads - you need to be able to predict how long stuff will execute in order to hide dispatch latency and startup costs... Throughput that can take a 25% hit on 100% loaded boxes depending on the phase of the moon makes life much harder and more expensive for everyone.