> I mean... this seems like a very good point, but from the rest of the article, and the previous one, it sounds like the patch was approved?

Intel actually said, in a short snippet where The Register refers to them as "Chipzilla", "If we plan to implement these updates in future products we will provide a deeper explanation of how they are implemented at that time.". One interpretation could be they are saying they haven't figured out if they are going to implement this in anything so they just added it for fun... I'd call that the "makes a good article" interpretation. The other interpretation is they plan to use the feature but have not yet finished planning which products will use it to unlock what and will talk about it in more detailed once planned, I'd call that the "corporatespeak decoded version". If you were a literal interpretation bot I would still say the corporatespeak version fits better than the article filler version hence why the extrapolations with that version don't match up to what is happening.

> Why was this allowed into the kernel? looks like drivers/platform/x86/intel/* mostly. Does intel just "own" that section of code? who accepts these patches?

I didn't look if it was actually accepted yet or just a proposed patchset but generally Intel will be the maintainers for Intel code (but not always) and they are one of the larger contributors to the kernel overall. You can see more details about maintainers and reviewers (as well as maintainers for sections of code) here https://www.kernel.org/doc/linux/MAINTAINERS#:~:text=One%20j....