Intel and others did give out a repair kit; they give you the option of disabling hyperthreading and a whole host of other optimizations. Those optimizations are both what provides this new side-channel of attack, and an immense speedup when they're enabled. You can't have one without the other.
Yet they are still advertising the number of threads without any mention of the vulnerabilities involved, well after those vulnerabilities have been disclosed. It's deceptive advertising at best.
