News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
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.
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.

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.