Yeah, kinda similar to rowhammer. I was just saying the other day that these exploit techniques are totally viable, but there's not much point - privesc is trivial on any desktop environment (linux or Windows, maybe less on osx), and usually not too hard on servers either. Fancy exploits aren't worth it when operating systems are so vulnerable to local attackers.

That said, the mitigations are assurances, and it also lets us point a finger at intel and say "fix your shit you just caused a global performance regression".