For an old CPU, finding all the valid instructions wasn’t very hard. You simply tried them all. Sure, really old CPUs might make it hard to tell what the instruction did, but once CPUs got illegal ...

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 ...

My understanding was that a CPU microcode update is stored in non-volatile memory on the motherboard and is loaded by the BIOS or UEFI into volatile memory on the CPU during boot. And because the ...

Protecting your computer is a very important task, one that requires your full attention whenever there’s a new vulnerability out in the wild. Now, you may not have known before, but your motherboard ...

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 ...

Last month, a team of Google security researchers released a tool that can modify microcode of AMD's processors based on the Zen microarchitecture, the Zentool. While this is a security vulnerability, ...

A dangerous potato: After researchers revealed the initial details of the Sinkclose security issue, AMD announced that a firmware update would be coming for some of its desktop, mobile, and server ...

A technical paper titled “Energy-Efficient Exposed Datapath Architecture With a RISC-V Instruction Set Mode” was published by researchers at Tampere University. “Transport triggered architectures ...