PC Gaming Apocalypse?

Wait for the next generation of ships from Intel before you consider it, or get AMD chips that have more cores and fewer Meltdowns... ;)

Yup. No Intel chips yet released are known to be safe - particularly Xeon and other server chips (a lot of the work on the problem was performed on these chips).

And Meltdown is trivial to attack whereas, as noted in both the original site's articles and The Register's articles, Spectre potentially takes between ten and thirty minutes of setup time and then about five minutes per 4GB of memory on the system that you want to read and is much, much harder to get right - essentially wasting all the above time if you did it wrong and the data reading is limited to the data the attacked application has access to - NOT kernel data - so your main issue is your web browser (which should already have updates out for it unless you're still running IE - for the love of God, why???) ... so I'm gonna say that AMD chips are still decidedly more secure than Intel ones.

TLDR; Intel chips left the front door open and put all your keys and money on a shelf by the door, AMD left a small window a small, nimble and especially cunning cat burglar with plenty of time on their hands could get to and only lets them see what you're doing in the house right now.

Still glad I bought AMD - speculative execution and hyperthreading was always a janky and potentially terrible (depending on your workload) way to do things**.

** In layman terms hyperthreading boils down to asking the user a question and while waiting for the answer guessing what that will be and doing the work necessary if that guess is correct... and then having to undo the work afterwards if the guess was wrong and THEN do the work it was supposed to do based on the users answer... AND Intel advertised the speed up they claimed this gave their consumer processors as an entire extra processor i.e. If a chip had one core they claimed it matched the speed of two... and two became four, etc. AMD / ARM chips don't do this, hence no Meltdown ;)

Meltdown is essentially the CPU dropping bits of paper with vital CPU information on the floor while doing this and then not picking them up again so letting the user take them and read them for themselves... oops! Spectre is the same but the vital information is only at the application level so your machine doesn't get exploited, only the application that you were using to run other people's code on (i.e. (for almost all people) your web browser).

Forgot to mention; Intel doesn't advertise hyperthreading as extra processors on it's business chips for a reason... it would never fly and basically would be a lie with business workloads...

It's probably that dealing with the problem has a fixed cost (in cycles) so more modern machines will deal with the problem quicker and at the cost of a smaller percentage of their cycles (since newer machines normally have more of those).