Abstract:Microcode is an abstraction layer on top of the physical components of a CPU and present in most generalpurpose CPUs today. In addition to facilitate complex and vast instruction sets, it also provides an update mechanism that allows CPUs to be patched in-place without requiring any special hardware. While it is well-known that CPUs are regularly updated with this mechanism, very little is known about its inner workings given that microcode and the update mechanism are proprietary and have not been throughly a… Show more
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