Dear Blick and WeatherCat sys-admins,
We've suspected memory leak for a while now and Intel has now confirmed.
Thanks for sharing this piece. I'm not sure if this kernel in question is inside the CPU or is using your Mac's general memory. Normally, as the article describes, the kernel that is using your Mac's memory is purely software. However, things have changed so much since I was working with these things I could be wrong. If I had to make a guess, there is more than one source for the memory issues. Clearly, macOS has an extremely dubious caching strategy. After rebooting I can reclaim almost 1 GB of RAM by purging caches that after all - shouldn't have anything in them - yet!
Oh well, . . . . . Edouard