What is a reasonable time estimate for Intel to release newly designed chips that do not have this flaw?
Any guesses when we will see cpu's without this vulnerability?
Let's work off what we know about Intel's roadmap for the next 2 years, which is surprisingly very little (another problem for another thread):
1). All Intel designs up to Cannonlake have the same basic Skylake core design. We can probably assume that all problems associated with Meltdown and Spectre will affect everything up to and including Cannonlake; furthermore, anything Skylake and later can't use Retpoline.
2). Icelake's design is far enough along that it will probably be impossible for Intel to fix everything (or even anything) to make Icelake immune to both Meltdown and Spectre. If Intel DOES manage to harden Icelake against both attacks, it implies that Intel knew about this problem for awhile as per
@maddie 's remarks above. Personally I expect Intel to release Icelake fully vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre in hardware, meaning that all Icelake systems will come with mitigation microcode pre-installed, and that all OS providers will need to patch against both exploits by default; in fact, I expect that to be the case for Whiskeylake, Cascade Lake, Icelake, and Tigerlake.
3). That basically leaves us with Sapphire Rapids. Tigerlake is just Icelake on 10nm, and Cascade Lake is just Skylake-X on . . . 14nm+++? Or something? I dunno. Anyway don't expect those architectures to save Intel from Metldown and Spectre.
So, probably Sapphire Rapids. Which comes out in 2020?