After my earlier adventures benchmarking CPython, I ended up going deep down a rabbithole on CPU branch prediction and learning a bunch of interesting things, which I have attempted to write up and share:

https://blog.nelhage.com/post/ittage-branch-predictor/

latest from @nelhage has way more plot twists than i expected! https://blog.nelhage.com/post/cpython-tail-call/

https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-the-art-of-microcode-hacking

Shot: "This opens up the potential for hardware attacks (e.g., reading the key from ROM with a scanning electron microscope), side-channel attacks (e.g., using Correlation Power Analysis to leak the key during validation), or other [...] attacks"
Chaser: "We noticed that the key from an old Zen 1 CPU was the example key of the NIST SP 800-38B publication and was reused until at least Zen 4 CPUs."