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Solved: What Is Microcode and Why You Need to Be Aware of It

k in the IT field and have anything to do with hardware or security, you need to have an awareness of CPU microcode. What is CPU Microcode? You can think of microcode as firmware for your CPU, and like other firmware it is updatable which means it is hackable.

This sequence consists of multiple micro-operations that control the various components of the CPU, such as the ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit), registers, and memory. With a goal to boost the execution of floating-point scalar code by 3 times and vector code by 5 times, compared to the 486DX chip, Intel decided to use the SRT algorithm that can generate two quotient bits per clock cycle, while the traditional 486 shift-and-subtract algorithm was generating only one quotient bit per cycle. However, due to public pressure and the potential impact on scientific and financial calculations, Intel eventually issued a recall and replaced the ALL of the affected processors at a cost of $475 million dollars.

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