I’ve worked with a lot of students who want to program computers. In particular, a lot of them want to program games. However, when they find out that after a few weeks of work they won’t be able to ...

For an old CPU, finding all the valid instructions wasn’t very hard. You simply tried them all. Sure, really old CPUs might make it hard to tell what the instruction did, but once CPUs got illegal ...

The processor we will be considering in this tutorial is the MIPS processor. The MIPS processor, designed in 1984 by researchers at Stanford University, is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) ...

A reader recently contacted us and asked a question worth answering in an article. How does Windows (and perhaps all OS's) take advantage of multiple cores? Alternatively, if this function is built ...

The design, verification, and implementation of a processor is the core competence of some companies, but others just want to whip up a small processor as quickly and cheaply as possible. What tools ...