All modern CPUs come out of the factory with many many bugs. The errata you see published are only the ones that they find after shipping (if you're lucky, they might not even publish all errata). Many bugs are fixed in testing and qualification before shipping.

That's how CPU design goes. The way that is done is by pushing as much to firmware as possible, adding chicken switches and fallback paths, and all sorts of ways to intercept regular operation and replace it with some trap to microcode or flush or degraded operation.

Applying fixes and workaround might cost quite a bit of performance (think spectre disabling of some kinds of branch predictors for an obvious very big one). And in some cases you even see in published errata they leave some theoretical correctness bugs unfixed entirely. Where is the line before accepting returns? Very blurry and unclear.

Almost certainly, huge parts of their voltage regulation (which goes along with frequency, thermal, and logic throttling) will be highly configurable. Quite likely it's run by entirely programmable microcontrollers on chip. Things that are baked into silicon might be voltage/droop sensors, temperature sensors, etc., and those could behave unexpectedly, although even then there might be redundancy or ways to compensate for small errors.

I don't see they "passed it off" as a microcode issue, just said that a microcode patch could fix it. As you see it's very hard from the outside to know if something can be reasonably fixed by microcode or to call it a "microcode issue". Most things can be fixed with firmware/microcode patches, by design. And many things are. For example if some voltage sensor circuit on the chip behaved a bit differently than expected in the design but they could correct it by adding some offsets to a table, then the "issue" is that silicon deviates from the model / design and that can not be changed, but firmware update would be a perfectly good fix, to the point they might never bother to redo the sensor even if they were doing a new spin of the masks.

On the voltage issue, they did not say it was requesting an out of spec voltage, they said it was incorrect. This is not necessarily detectable out of context. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling and all the analog issues that go with it are fiendishly complicated, voltage requested from a regulator is not what gets seen at any given component of the chip, loads, switching, capacitance, frequency, temperature, etc., can all conspire to change these things. And modern CPUs run as close to absolute minimum voltage/timing guard bands as possible to improve efficiency, and they boost up to as high voltages as they can to increase performance. A small bug or error in some characterization data in this very complicated algorithm of many variables and large multi dimensional tables could easily cause voltage/timing to go out of spec and cause instability. And it does not necessarily leave some nice log you can debug because you can't measure voltage from all billion components in the chip on a continuous basis.

And some bugs just take a while to find and fix. I'm not a tester per se but I found a logic bug in a CPU (not Intel but commercial CPU) that was quickly reproducible and resulted in a very hard lockup of a unit in the core, but it still took weeks to find it. Imagine some ephemeral analog bug lurking in a dusty corner of their operating envelope.

Then you actually have to develop the fix, then you have to run that fix through quite a rigorous testing process and get reasonable confidence that it solves the problem, before you would even make this announcement to say you've solved it. Add N more weeks for that.

So, not to say a dishonest or bad motivation from Intel is out of the question. But it seems impossible to make such speculations from the information we have. This announcement would be quite believable to me.