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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A team of Google researchers working with AMD recently discovered a major CPU exploit on Zen-based processors. The exploit ...

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 ...

The big picture: Intel has finally identified all the underlying culprits behind the instability issues plaguing its 13th- and 14th-gen processors. While the company previously recognized the root ...