Oh god, "Engineer" Wu is back.
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Sigh.
1) Page tables are tree structured descriptions of how the physical memory is mapped to virtual memory space by the MMU. This is chiefly so you can specify permissions and cache attributes for parts of memory on a per-process basis just by swapping a pointer over. Without this mechanism there would be no process isolation and every single process on the computer could trash hardware and crash the computer. Any process that attempts an access that is forbidden triggers a page fault, and you can use that to do all sorts of useful things like only loading memory pages on demand, swapping pages out to disk when they're not in use, or mapping some pages as copy on write so that multiple processes can use the same data until such time as they need their own copy.
These are all things that are very much needed, and Wu's simplistic "hur dur, we all have 10 million petabytes of RAM now" is nothing to the point.
2) SPECTRE/Meltdown have NOTHING to do with page tables. They're cache timing attacks. Wu doesn't understand even the basic theory of CPU operation and doesn't understand these attacks.
I have to imagine that a good amount of Wu's audience must know Wu is full of shit. This is just too blatant technobabble with the "CPU ring execution" splooge. This is the person calling her out so far:
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