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Is there any meaningful way to know what the differences are between previous microcodes?

Only what Intel provides, the updates are AFAIK encrypted.

And no reverse engineering possible?

I'm a bit surprised there is no enthusiast blog that tries to document intel microcode changes, but maybe I just haven't found it yet.

It's being reverse engineered as we speak. Great CCC talk from a couple of weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY5kucyhKFc

AFAIK, that's referring to AMD microcode, not Intel. The problem with reverse engineering modern AMD and Intel microcode is that the updates are signed and encrypted, so you can't do the necessary probing to see what's going on under the hood.

This might be interesting reading for you: http://inertiawar.com/microcode/

Signed with 2048-bit RSA, and probably encrypted too.

Yes! I love it, even if there were meager returns; basically identifying the algorithms for encrypting/signing the blob and that's all.

Thanks that was an absolutely fascinating read!

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