As far as I know, Ubuntu Artful is now unsupported, so users of Ubuntu Artful must ensure they switched to Ubuntu Bionic Beaver *or* manually update their intel-microcode package to the one in Bionic Beaver for them to have microcode 0xb00002e.
I am not sure this will fix this issue, however. A report explicitly stating whether Ubuntu Bionic Beaver is affected by this bug report would be really helpful.
Looks like I should add:
As far as I know, Ubuntu Artful is now unsupported, so users of Ubuntu Artful must ensure they switched to Ubuntu Bionic Beaver *or* manually update their intel-microcode package to the one in Bionic Beaver for them to have microcode 0xb00002e.
I am not sure this will fix this issue, however. A report explicitly stating whether Ubuntu Bionic Beaver is affected by this bug report would be really helpful.