When homebrewing a CPU, one has to deal with microcode. Microcode is the low-level nuts and bolts of how, precisely, a CPU executes instructions (like opcodes) and performs functions such as updating ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...