The problem is not isolated to just Intel chips and was identified 6 months ago by Google research scientists who immediately notified the manufacturers of these chips. Google gave these companies until 8 Jan 2018 to get their act together but the info was leaked a week early.
Of co-incidence is a number of Intel execs offloading their shares in their own company including the CEO.
From what I have read cloud providers (Microsoft and Amazon) have already addressed the issue in their infrastructure. RedHat and Apple have released a patch today and Microsoft have one available for the next patch Tuesday.
Besides the potential performance hit the event is looking to be a non-issue for those that maintain their computers.
Although the exploit allows a non-privelidged user to query the speculative CPU cache it doesn't allow control or modification of what is in there, you would have to be quite lucky to find something of interest like a password. Nonetheless, it's an exploit vector and should be dealt with by the patch.
The big thing on my mind at the moment is will there be a class action against these companies and can we get our computers/CPUs updated at no cost.