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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 ...

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 ...

Facepalm: Intel is attempting to block benchmarks and performance tests from being shared on Linux platforms through a change to the terms of use found in a microcode ...

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 ...

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 ...