This is actually a bug. Intel specifies only bits 52:50 of MSR 0x17 to be architectural. The other bits are reserved, so the vmkernel shouldn't insist that those bits be the same across all cpus. In the PSOD screen, only some of the lower-order bits differ. Bits 52:50 are zero in both.
Note that MSR 0x17 is not the microcode revision. It's the platform ID; see Intel documentation for details.
You can boot with cpuUniformityHardCheckPanic=FALSE to work around this.
Thanks to Valentin for alerting me to it.
