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An interesting detail about the Intel 8087 floating point processor (FPU) is that it’s a co-processor that shares a bus with the 8086 or 8088 CPU and system memory, which means that somehow ...

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 ...

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 ...

Something to look forward to: Intel's plan to address voltage-related crashes on desktop processors with a patch has some worried that performance and overclocking will take a hit. Past updates to ...

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 ...

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 ...

Researchers have devised a new method that allows potential attackers to leak sensitive information such as encryption keys from the Linux kernel’s memory and Intel SGX enclaves. The attack, dubbed ...