There was a time when owning a computer meant you probably knew most or all of the instructions it could execute. Your modern PC, though, has a lot of instructions, many of them meant for specialized ...

There is a certain benefit to being an early adopter. If you were around when Unix or MSDOS had a handful of commands, it wasn’t hard to learn. Then you learn new things as they come along. If you ...

Are you sufficiently paranoid? If you’re not, there’s now Sandsifter. This project, just announced at Defcon 2017, tests your x86 processor for hidden instructions and bugs. “Sandsifter has uncovered ...

Although processor to hardware partitioning can be successfully resolved by a combination of designer experience, precedent, tools, such as profilers and data-transfer analyzers …and a degree of ...

A team based at STMicroelectronics' (ST) central R&D lab in Agrate, Italy, has built a processor with a dynamically programmable instruction set. The work will be presented at the Custom Integrated ...

There was a time when the clock speed of a CPU was the only thing people were talking about. Back at the turn of the century, Intel and AMD locked horns in a race to release the first 1GHz desktop CPU ...

For those not immediately familiar with RISC-V, it is a relatively new CPU architecture which takes advantage of Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) principles. RISC-V is an open standard ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about new technologies and usage models transforming business. Well over 90% of cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) ...