I encourage people to learn about ITP port and JTAG debuggers for processors. It is easy to verify all of this with ITP debugger in no time. I am surprised nobody did it. It is amateurish at least for a 15 years of experience. I'd expect a researcher like that to know about hardware ITP port. How do you think BIOS or UEFI firmware are developed and debugged? The cost of the debugger is 20k USD and you hook directly into the CPU bus and see everything from SMM mode transitions to cache events. Complete transparency without the sci-fi claims anymore and crap publicity.
EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-target_probe