ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 18 -- United States Patent no. 12,327,123, issued on June 10, was assigned to Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Count to empty for microarchitectural return predictor security" was invented by Mathew Lowes (Austin, Texas) and Martin Licht (Round Rock, Texas).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An embodiment of an integrated circuit may comprise a return stack buffer (RSB), a speculative return stack buffer (SRSB), and circuitry coupled to the RSB and the SRSB, the circuitry to track a count until the SRSB is empty at a time of a prediction by a branch prediction unit, and return an output from the branch prediction unit that corresponds to one of the RSB and the SRSB based a...