[basementcat]

My guess is something like the following:

Modern CPU's are incredibly complex machines with a ridiculously large amount of possible configuration states (too large to exhaustively test after manufacture or sim during design), e.g. a vector multiply in flight with an AES encode in flight with x87 sincos, etc. Each operation is going to draw a certain amount of current. It is impractical to guarantee each functional unit with the required current but the supply rails are sized for a "reasonable worst case".

Perhaps an underestimate was mistakenly made somewhere and not caught until recently. Therefore the fix might be to modify the instruction dispatcher (via microcode) to guarantee that certain instruction configurations cannot happen (e.g. let the x87 sincos stall until the vector multiply is done) to reduce pressure on the voltage regulator.

[hedgehog]

It's worse than that, thermal management is part of the puzzle. Think of that as heat generation happening across three dimensions (X + Y + time) along with diffusion in 3D through the package.

[CoastalCoder]

It's an interesting idea, but there's a caveat: time flows in just one direction.