That was my initial understanding, but I figured I'd give the parent commenter the benefit of the doubt in case my understanding was flawed. Some more searchin

That was my initial understanding, but I figured I'd give the parent commenter the benefit of the doubt in case my understanding was flawed. Some more searching seems to lead back to where I started: the microcode itself isn't phoning home, the only phoning "home" that occurs is the normal process of "when you pull down an update for something, it requires phoning to the repository holding the updates".