x86

ASM Bots brings the classic Core War programming game to life using real 8086 machine code, letting bot authors write actual x86 assembly to battle in a simulated memory arena.

A project called BootLife implements Conway's Game of Life in a 512-byte x86 boot sector, using VGA memory for the simulation grid.

The article explains the history and reasoning behind the naming of the x86 undefined instruction 'ud2', tracing its evolution from unofficial opcodes to Intel's official implementation due to Hyrum's Law.

Sectorforth is a minimal 16-bit x86 Forth implementation that fits within a 512-byte boot sector, allowing users to compile and run Forth code in a boot environment.

A minimal kernel designed to run a NES emulator without any operating system, with additional programs like Mandelbrot fractal visualization.

A tweet shares a free book called 539kernel that teaches building an entire operating system from the x86 boot sector at address 0x7C00, progressing from the first instruction to a working kernel.

A new exploit technique breaks System Management Mode (SMM) security on x86 CPUs by using an extremely long-running single instruction to desynchronize cores, allowing an attacker to execute SMM code while another core remains outside the protected environment. A proof-of-concept for Zen 3 Ryzen processors is provided.

Security researcher Domas reveals rosenbridge, a hardware backdoor in VIA C3 x86 CPUs that allows unprivileged code to bypass processor protections and access kernel memory. The repository provides tools to check for and mitigate the vulnerability.

The Assembly Hall of Shame is a GitHub project that ranks the slowest possible single x86 instructions by exploiting hardware quirks such as MMIO latency and microcode assists, achieving extreme latencies like a 62-second fxrstor64.

A llama.cpp pull request adds an x86 VNNI implementation for Q2_0 × Q8_0 dot products, delivering 3.0–3.6x CPU-only speedups on Bonsai models with bit-for-bit kernel correctness and 99.2% token agreement.

ao486 is an open-source Verilog core implementing a full 486 SX processor and SoC capable of booting Linux and Windows 95 on an FPGA, with benchmarks and resource usage documented from 2014.

AMD has achieved a 46% revenue share in x86 server CPUs, up from nearly zero in 2017, driven by its new Venice processors that offer 2.2x performance per core over Nvidia's comparable chip. The shift highlights a growing preference for modular CPU+GPU setups in AI agentic workloads over Nvidia's vertically integrated racks.

A blog post describes the process of building GCC 1.27, a 1988 compiler, on a modern Ubuntu system, detailing necessary patches and steps.

The article analyzes the new ACE specification from the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group, which extends Intel's AMX for AI matrix multiplication with fixed tile sizes and outer product instructions, comparing it to Arm's SME.

A website comparing PostgreSQL performance and cost across 23 EC2 instance types on AWS, with benchmarks at 33,000 RPS.

A bare-metal x86 tool for dumping system RAM to a boot medium via cold boot attacks, useful for security research and experiments.

This video uses disassembly and the WinDbg debugging tool to reveal that the eight mystery bytes that appear when calloc allocates memory in an x86 environment are actually the entry header of the Windows heap manager, containing information such as the current block size and the previous block size.

A retrospective analysis argues that the 8086 segmented memory architecture was a clever design that could have scaled gracefully, but software developers' insistence on treating memory as a flat space led to its perceived flaws.

The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group has published the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification, defining new x86 instructions and register state for accelerating matrix multiplication and reduced precision data formats in machine learning workloads.

MONOLITH is an experimental non-Unix operating system for x86 architecture, available as an open-source project on Codeberg.