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 updati… ...

Here’s how, and why, the Spectre and Meltdown patches will hurt performance Now that microcode and patches are starting to ship, a clearer picture is emerging.

Up to this point, Intel’s guidance has been a list of dense BIOS settings that could reduce performance by upwards of 9% on CPUs like the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K. The microcode update ...

This weekend, I was excited to deploy my first Ryzen 3000-powered workstation in my home office. Unfortunately, a microcode bug—originally discovered in July but still floating around in large ...

You can see more details of temporary fixes for Intel CPUs on MSI's website.However, if your motherboard manufacturer hasn't yet released a BIOS update that lists the specific microcode 0x125 ...

Inside every modern CPU since the Intel Pentium fdiv bug, assembly instructions aren’t a one-to-one mapping to what the CPU actually does. Inside the CPU, there is a decoder that turns assemb… ...

So microcode is now loaded into the processor at startup as an unencrypted and signed binary blob. If you're smart enough to break that and reverse engineer the microcode, you're in business.

It’s worth noting that these patches will help those users who have yet to run into any snags with their Intel CPUs. The microcode update should prevent issues with increased voltages in Intel ...

As noted on the support page for Windows 10 version 1803, the microcode updates include mitigations for Spectre Variant 3a, CVE-2018-3640, Spectre Variant 4, CVE-2018-3639, as well as two of the ...

For example, Thor Larholm at PiVX points out that microcode utilities for CPUs are available from both Intel and AMD, complete with source code. This could be used to corrupt the CPU, causing a ...

Intel isn't making it easy for customers to figure out if they are affected, either. The company has yet to give 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core users a way to tell if their processor is affected ...

The microcode 129 update is expected to fix Intel's instability issues, and there are download links available for individual boards. MSI wasn't far behind ASUS with its own motherboard BIOS ...