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 ...

When homebrewing a CPU, one has to deal with microcode. Microcode is the low-level nuts and bolts of how, precisely, a CPU executes instructions (like opcodes) and performs functions such as updating ...

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 ...

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 ...