What just happened? AMD has confirmed a security vulnerability in some of its processors, which was inadvertently revealed through a beta BIOS update from Asus. The flaw, described as a "microcode ...

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 ...

Microcode 0x12B “addresses elevated voltage requests by the processor during idle and/or light activity periods.” Microcode 0x12B “addresses elevated voltage requests by the processor during idle ...

The Intel Microcode Boot Loader creates a bootable USB flash drive that automatically applies the latest Intel microcodes to your identified CPU so that you are protected from the speculative ...

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 ...

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 ...

Intel reports that it has developed a stable microcode update to address the Spectre flaw for its Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors in all their various variants. The microcode updates ...

A new variant of the Spectre attack on Intel CPUs can be used to crack open Intel's secure enclaves to view their memory. The so-called SgxPectre side-channel attack affects programs with sensitive ...

Those who recover disk drives know how easy it is also to destroy them. This week’s column, Awaiting the PC Killers, discusses the possibility of using such knowledge to create highly destructive ...

NVidia's Denver architecture is implementing ARM's ARMv8 64-bit architecture from the ground up using techniques like dynamic code optimization. NVidia often takes an interesting approach with its ...