I think the discussion here is missing the fact that "long boot time" is on the order of milliseconds. From the article: the average time for a ucode update on

I think the discussion here is missing the fact that "long boot time" is on the order of milliseconds. From the article: the average time for a ucode update on the test machine was 489k cycles, which at 2.53GHz is 193 microseconds. I hardly count that as a large part of the boot time...