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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...