From the command 'cpuid' I believe the [XX]-[XX]-[XX] is: <extended family><family>-<extended model><model>->stepping id> Those values are all in the first f

From the command 'cpuid' I believe the [XX]-[XX]-[XX] is: <extended family><family>-<extended model><model>->stepping id> Those values are all in the first few lines of output from 'cpuid'. The [XX]->[XX] is probably [old microcode version]->[new microcode version] If the cpuid for a processor is not listed in those release notes, I don't think there's a reason to believe the processor has received a microcode update. It might be worth comparing the microcode blob to Intel's last release in 2017-11 to confirm. It looks to me like the microcode version can be read out from hexdump <XX-XX-XX from .tgz> | head -n1 | cut -f4,5 -d' ' where the first field is the lower 16 bits and the second field is the upper 16 bits. I don't have any documentation to prove this assumption, it is just based on comparing the listed microcode versions to those fields in the binary blobs. But doing a straight 'diff' would probably be good enough to tell if the microcode file has changed. Some Linux vendors like CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu may have microcode updates for processors that weren't part of this release, I'm not sure.