 A second prominent example is the set of microcode patches that Intel offered for some of their processor architectures of up to 10 years in age, in a bid to counter the security vulnerabilities discovered in their designs - Spectre and Meltdown - which went public at the start of 2018.A microcode update can be installed by Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, or the motherboard BIOS.The design trend toward heavily microcoded processors with complex instructions began in the early 1960s and continued until roughly the mid-1980s.