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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In context: Microcode is machine instruction sets that load from the BIOS. It acts much like firmware for the PC's processor. According to MSI Marketing Director Eric van Beurden, AMD will be ...

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 ...

Last month, a team of Google security researchers released a tool that can modify microcode of AMD's processors based on the Zen microarchitecture, the Zentool. While this is a security vulnerability, ...

From a technical standpoint, everything a computer does involves reading, manipulating, and storing information through microcode instructions that move around 0’s and 1’s. Each operation performed by ...