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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.
In August 2014, Intel announced that a bug exists in the TSX/TSX-NI implementation on Haswell, Haswell-E, Haswell-EP and early Broadwell CPUs, which resulted in disabling the TSX/TSX-NI feature on affected CPUs via a microcode update. [9] [10] [23] The bug was fixed in F-0 steppings of the vPro-enabled Core M-5Y70 Broadwell CPU in November 2014 ...
The XSAVE instruction set extensions are designed to save/restore CPU extended state (typically for the purpose of context switching) in a manner that can be extended to cover new instruction set extensions without the OS context-switching code needing to understand the specifics of the new extensions.
The act of writing microcode is often referred to as microprogramming, and the microcode in a specific processor implementation is sometimes termed a microprogram. Through extensive microprogramming, microarchitectures of smaller scale and simplicity can emulate more robust architectures with wider word lengths, additional execution units , and ...
Without reprogrammable microcode, an expensive processor swap would be required; [36] for example, the Pentium FDIV bug became an expensive fiasco for Intel as it required a product recall because the original Pentium processor's defective microcode could not be reprogrammed. Operating systems can update main processor microcode also. [37] [38]
According to AMD it is not practical but the company will release a microcode update for the affected products. Also in August 2023 a new vulnerability called Downfall or Gather Data Sampling was disclosed, [ 63 ] [ 64 ] [ 65 ] affecting Intel CPU Skylake, Cascade Lake, Cooper Lake, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Amber Lake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake ...
Intel promised microcode updates to resolve the vulnerability. [1] The microcode patches have been shown to significantly reduce the performance of some heavily-vectorized loads. [7] Patches to mitigate the effects of the vulnerability have also been created as part of the forthcoming version 6.5 release of the Linux kernel. [8]
[10] The buggy revisions are typically found in 68LC040-based Apple Macintosh computers. Chips with mask set 2E23G (as used in the LC 475) have been confirmed to be faulty. The fault relates to pending writes being lost when the F-line exception is triggered. [11] The 68040 cannot update its microcode in the manner of modern x86 chips.