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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

NVidia often takes an interesting approach with its technology, and the firm’s upcoming dual-core Tegra K1-64 is no different. It employs the Denver CPU architecture that implements ARM’s ARMv8 64-bit ...