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Machine checks are a hardware problem, not a software problem. They are often the result of overclocking or overheating. In some cases, the CPU will shut itself off once passing a thermal limit to avoid permanent damage. But they can also be caused by bus errors introduced by other failing components, like memory or I/O devices.
In the mid-1990s, a facility for supplying new microcode was initially referred to as the Pentium Pro BIOS Update Feature. [18] [19] It was intended that user-mode applications should make a BIOS interrupt call to supply a new "BIOS Update Data Block", which the BIOS would partially validate and save to nonvolatile BIOS memory; this could be supplied to the installed processors on next boot.
Later versions of Windows implement more complex CPU power saving methods. On these systems the idle thread will call routines in the Hardware Abstraction Layer to reduce CPU clock speed or to implement other power-saving mechanisms. There are more detailed sources of such information available through Windows' performance monitoring system ...
The Time Stamp Counter was once a high-resolution, low-overhead way for a program to get CPU timing information. With the advent of multi-core/hyper-threaded CPUs, systems with multiple CPUs, and hibernating operating systems, the TSC cannot be relied upon to provide accurate results — unless great care is taken to correct the possible flaws: rate of tick and whether all cores (processors ...
In early processors, the TSC was a cycle counter, incrementing by 1 for each clock cycle (which could cause its rate to vary on processors that could change clock speed at runtime) – in later processors, it increments at a fixed rate that doesn't necessarily match the CPU clock speed.
In computing, the instruction register (IR) or current instruction register (CIR) is the part of a CPU's control unit that holds the instruction currently being executed or decoded. [1] In simple processors, each instruction to be executed is loaded into the instruction register, which holds it while it is decoded, prepared and ultimately ...
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BIOS interrupt calls perform hardware control or I/O functions requested by a program, return system information to the program, or do both. A key element of the purpose of BIOS calls is abstraction - the BIOS calls perform generally defined functions, and the specific details of how those functions are executed on the particular hardware of the system are encapsulated in the BIOS and hidden ...