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 ...

There is a certain benefit to being an early adopter. If you were around when Unix or MSDOS had a handful of commands, it wasn’t hard to learn. Then you learn new things as they come along. If you ...

Are you sufficiently paranoid? If you’re not, there’s now Sandsifter. This project, just announced at Defcon 2017, tests your x86 processor for hidden instructions and bugs. “Sandsifter has uncovered ...

Arm introduces custom instructions on select Arm CPU cores at Arm TechCon. The first CPU core is the Cortex-M33. In one of the many announcements today at Arm’s annual technology conference, Arm ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about new technologies and usage models transforming business. Well over 90% of cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) ...