Video gamers know about cheat codes, but assembly language programmers are often in search of undocumented instructions. One way to find them is to map out all of a CPU’s opcodes and where there are ...

As simple as a processor’s instruction set may seem, especially in a 1978-era one like the Intel 8086, there is quite a bit going on to go from something like a conditional jump instruction to a set ...

On January 8th Intel released new Linux Processor microcode data files that can be used to mitigate the Spectre and and Meltdown vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs. Using microcode files, an operating ...

Gregory Tang and Rajat Bahl, AMD, Inc. Alex Wakefield and Padmaraj Ramachandran, Synopsys Inc. As microprocessor designs have grown considerably in complexity, the use of hand-written directed tests ...

Something to look forward to: Intel's plan to address voltage-related crashes on desktop processors with a patch has some worried that performance and overclocking will take a hit. Past updates to ...

In a nutshell: Google researchers recently disclosed a stealthy security flaw dubbed "EntrySign" that allowed malicious code execution through unsigned microcode patches on AMD processors from Zen 1 ...

High performance controller designs used bit-slice components for their speed and design flexibility. Speeds of 10-20 million instructions per second (MIPS) are common and the designer can use bit ...