This is much ado about nothing.
[Disclaimer: coming at this from the POV of the
Debian furore regarding the EULA]:
#906158 - intel-microcode: Update intel-microcode to 20180807 - Debian Bug report logs
I have to respectfully disagree quite strongly here. This is effectively a security patch to a shipping product and the fine print is now saying that a) you're not allowed to redistribute the microcode (hence why Debian are up in arms about it as they can't legally distribute it any more as part of their security patches) and b) publishing of benchmarks of any code running on CPUs with this microcode are prohibited which means... well, as it stands on paper at the moment, no more benchmarking allowed without mutual consent from Intel - that goes for you and your site too Patrick.
Still, it'd certainly make AMD look infinitely faster than Intel on the graphs
Law of unintended consequences and all that.
Now of course you could argue that there's no way the EULA would stand up in court (indeed in most if not all EU jurisdictions it'd almost certainly be deemed an unreasonable term and thus null and void, and EULAs in general aren't considered legally binding) but the US is a different matter and, regardless, people shouldn't have to have to consult with a lawyer to apply a bloody security patch.
I'd have hoped given the year they've had Intel would be looking for all the good PR they could get. The marketing department needs to get take the spade away from the legal department. And then the engineering department needs to take away the spade from the marketing department, and then bury both the legal and marketing department in the holes along with some of the unearthed Atari ET cartridges.
E2A: Now I'm hoping what's happened here is that Intel have mistakenly attached the legalese for their Super-Secret Testing Microcode instead of using their normal legalese for the Totally Normal Redistributable Microcode; restricting distribution and testing on non-production microcode makes some degree of sense. But it makes no sense at all for applying to half the world's CPUs.