Comment by qb45

> I wonder how many users have experienced intermittent crashes

I wonder if it's exploitable ;) Maybe that's why they never release the details of these CPU bugs.

> Was it a software-like bug in microcode e.g. neglecting some edge-case, or a hardware-level race condition related to marginal timing

Not sure about microcode, these x86 cores execute many simple operations natively, by means of dedicated circuits. Microcode is only involved in emulation of complex x86 instructions.

And hardware problem doesn't have to be marginal timing. It could simply be a logic bug, i.e. the circuit operates as designed but it was designed to do something else than it should be doing in some unforeseen circumstances.