Tag Archives: Processor

An Arduino From The Distant Past

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Arduinos are a handy tool to have around. They’re versatile, cheap, easy to program, and have a ton of software libraries to build on. They’ve only been around for about a decade and a half though, so if you were living in 1989 and wanted to program a microcontroller you’d probably be stuck with an 8-bit microprocessor with no built-in peripherals to help, reading from a physical book about registers and timing, and probably trying to get a broken ribbon cable to behave so it would actually power up. If you want a less frustrating alternate history to live in, …read more

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Intel CPUs Undermined By Fresh Speculative Execution Flaws

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‘Foreshadow” and other vulnerabilities in Intel processors can be exploited to steal sensitive information stored inside personal computers or personal clouds. Continue reading Intel CPUs Undermined By Fresh Speculative Execution Flaws→

Researchers Say AMD Processors Have Serious Vulnerabilities and Backdoors

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Security researchers announced a series of 13 vulnerabilities within AMD’s RYZEN and EPYC processors that could make some data breaches even worse. Continue reading Researchers Say AMD Processors Have Serious Vulnerabilities and Backdoors→

Meltdown and Spectre fallout: patching problems persist

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In the days since Meltdown and Spectre have been made public, we’ve tracked which elements of the design flaw, known as speculative execution, are vulnerable and how different vendors are handling the patching process.
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Meltdown and Spectre: what you need to know

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2018 gets off to a rough start as manufacturers and software vendors tackle a series of severe bugs called Meltdown and Spectre that affect all modern computers.
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Security world

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Sowbug Cyberespionage Group Hits South America, South Asia

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Security researchers have identified a cyberespionage group that has been stealing data from policy and diplomatic organizations in South America and South Asia since at least 2015. “While cyberespionage attacks are often seen against targets in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, it is much less common to see South American countries targeted,” researchers from Symantec..

The post Sowbug Cyberespionage Group Hits South America, South Asia appeared first on Security Boulevard.

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Bespoke Processors Might Soon Power Your Artisanal Devices

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Modern microprocessors are a marvel of technological progress and engineering. At less than a dollar per unit, even the cheapest microprocessors on the market are orders of magnitude more powerful than their ancestors. The first commercially available single-chip processor, the Intel 4004, cost roughly $25 (in today’s dollars) when it was introduced in 1971.

The 4-bit 4004 clocked in at 740 kHz — paltry by today’s standards, but quite impressive at the time. However, what was remarkable about the 4004 was the way it shifted computer design architecture practically overnight. Previously, multiple chips were used for processing and were selected …read more

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Under the Hood of AMD’s Threadripper

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Although AMD has been losing market share to Intel over the past decade, they’ve recently started to pick up steam again in the great battle for desktop processor superiority. A large part of this surge comes in the high-end, multi-core processor arena, where it seems like AMD’s threadripper is clearly superior to Intel’s competition. Thanks to overclocking expert [der8auer] we can finally see what’s going on inside of this huge chunk of silicon.

The elephant in the room is the number of dies on this chip. It has a massive footprint to accommodate all four dies, each with …read more

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The Gray-1, A Computer Composed Entirely Of ROM And RAM

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When we learn about the internals of a microprocessor, we are shown a diagram that resembles the 8-bit devices of the 1970s. There will be an ALU, a program counter, a set of registers, and address and data line decoders. Most of us never go significantly further into the nuances of more modern processors because there is no need. All a processor needs to be is a black box, unless it has particularly sparked your interest or you are working in bare-metal assembly language.

We imagine our simple microprocessor as built from logic gates, and indeed there have been many …read more

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