Not to forget, Intel have said this collection of exploits cannot be fixed in microcode, only mitigated - it's so fundamental to the CPU hardware that it requires redesigning the chip to fix properly. The mitigation has led to serious performance hits and further problems down the line. And the permanent fix requires eventually replacing the CPU.
As has been previously noted, Meltdown, Spectre and related exploits came about because nobody ever thought it would be possible to access the cache from other processes. 1 year is probably quite reasonable for Intel to redesign the architecture (in fact, is probably going to stretch to 2 years or more), but people need security fixes now. In this case, it looks like OpenBSD are taking the right approach.
