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 ...

Continuing his reverse-engineering of the Intel 8087, [Ken Shirriff] covers the conditional tests that are implemented in the microcode of this floating point processing unit (FPU). This microcode ...

In context: Microcode is machine instruction sets that load from the BIOS. It acts much like firmware for the PC's processor. According to MSI Marketing Director Eric van Beurden, AMD will be ...

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 ...

WTF?! The Arrow Lake fiasco has become increasingly absurd. Intel had promised to address the ongoing performance issues with its new processors by January 2025. However, the latest firmware updates ...

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 ...

Researchers have devised a new method that allows potential attackers to leak sensitive information such as encryption keys from the Linux kernel’s memory and Intel SGX enclaves. The attack, dubbed ...