I agree, but asking this of Intel is the equivalent to asking Google to bare the details of their search ranking algorithm so that we could understand some odd

I agree, but asking this of Intel is the equivalent to asking Google to bare the details of their search ranking algorithm so that we could understand some odd search result. The clever tricks and optimizations they do in the cores are their crown jewels, just as the guts of clever, highly-tuned algorithms are for many software companies. It just so happens that many people have a high-level knowledge of modern out-of-order CPUs (just as many people have read Google's PageRank paper) and so can speculate about what might be going on inside.