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A comment on An introduction to reverse-engineering x86 microcode and writing it. Parent comment

Re:An introduction to reverse-engineering x86 microcode and ... by mschuster91 on Friday December 29, 2017 @08:33AM (#16029385)
> As the speakers in this talk point out, open microcode would allow extending the CPU with brand-new capabilities,

Exactly this is why CPU vendors won't do anything in that regard. They don't want people to have a way to avoid upgrading the hardware by buying a new processor.

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Re:An introduction to reverse-engineering x86 microcode and ... by marcosdumay on Friday December 29, 2017 @10:49AM (#16030003)
People upgrade CPUs mostly because of cache size, core count, IO speed, and core speed. Only the last one can improve by hacking microcode, and only marginally.
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Re:An introduction to reverse-engineering x86 microcode and ... by mschuster91 on Friday December 29, 2017 @10:59AM (#16030065)
> Only the last one can improve by hacking microcode

You can implement entirely new instructions in microcode.

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Re:An introduction to reverse-engineering x86 microcode and ... by madez on Saturday December 30, 2017 @01:25AM (#16034135)
The authors say in the talk that that likely wouldn't be significantly faster than the equivalent x86 instructions.
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