Why Aptitude Gives Intel-Microcode Upgrades on AMD Processor

amd-processoraptitude

I have a Supermicro AS-2022G-URF (H8DGU motherboard) with 2 AMD Opteron 6272 16C/16T 2.1GHz and an LSI MegaRAID SAS 2108 RAID controller currently running Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS (scheduled to be upgraded to 16.04 this summer). Several times over the last year, when I have done aptitude update/upgrade, the intel-microcode package has shown up as one of the packages that will be installed. Since this server has AMD processors, not Intel, Why does aptitude offer this package? Is it in any way necessary for other reasons? Any ill effects from going along with aptitude on this?

Best Answer

Because it is a dependency of the kernel. I checked running the command below:

$ apt depends linux-image-generic
linux-image-generic
Depends: linux-image-4.15.0-50-generic
Depends: linux-modules-extra-4.15.0-50-generic
Depends: linux-firmware
Depends: intel-microcode
Depends: amd64-microcode.
Recommends: thermald

There should be no harm, they won't load to the wrong cpu.