x86 harmful
Awesome content from Joanna. I'm not competent enough to criticize but at least I'm interested enough to learn.
It seems we're building our houses on a kind of a sandstone, which is solid only when you look by distance.
The paper provides a comprehensive introduction into some over-engineered technologies developed by Intel to workaround security problems.
If you're interested in getting frustrated and question your own motivations, I recommend you to take a look on this. It worth: GitHub - rootkovska/x86harmful: The "Intel x86 considered harmful" paper
Going further, maybe there's interesting opportunities in the firmware and microcode development and the RISC-V page in Wikipedia seems to agree:
CPU design requires design expertise in several specialties: electronic digital logic, compilers, and operating systems. To cover the costs of such a team, commercial vendors of processor intellectual property (IP), such as Arm Ltd. and MIPS Technologies, charge royalties for the use of their designs and patents.