The previous wording outlawed public benchmarking of the chips because Intel thought that if it made it a legal requirement that no one benchmark its chips, no one would notice that, even with the new microcode in place, turning off hyperthreading is necessary to protect virtual machines from attack via Foreshadow, meaning that chip performance will drop.

It was the sort of thing a legal department rather than the PR department might come up with and it has had the opposite effect of what Intel desired. A minor problem has suddenly become a much bigger issue as the press has assumed that performance is so bad on the latest Spectre patch that Intel had to prohibit publishing benchmarks.

In response to the outcry, Intel subsequently said it would rewrite the licensing terms. And now the fix is in.

Imad Sousou, corporate VP and general manager of Intel Open Source Technology Center said: "We have simplified the Intel licence to make it easier to distribute CPU microcode updates and posted the new version here. As an active member of the open source community, we continue to welcome all feedback and thank the community." The reworked licence no longer prohibits benchmarking.