A monthly overview of things you need to know as an architect or aspiring architect. Unlock the full InfoQ experience by logging in! Stay updated with your favorite authors and topics, engage with ...

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 ...

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 ...