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 ...

Video gamers know about cheat codes, but assembly language programmers are often in search of undocumented instructions. One way to find them is to map out all of a CPU’s opcodes and where there are ...

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 ...

If instruction sets didn't matter, processors would be cheaper and designers would have more options. That's why one startup's efforts are so intriguing. Every microprocessor is different, in part ...

I'm still busily beavering away on the idea of my Heath Robinson Rube Goldberg mixed-technology computer (relays, vacuum tubes, transistors, fluidic logic, etc.). As you'll see if you visit the above ...