According to a new Linux patch spotted by AMD, AMD’s future microprocessors could more than double the microcode size compared to existing AMD CPUs. phonics. The increase in microcode size could suggest that AMD’s upcoming processors based on the Zen 5 microarchitecture and their successors could support more complex instructions or add new features after release. Or maybe AMD just wants to be able to update the microcode more accurately. thorough method.
The maximum size of a microcode patch for AMD CPUs currently supported by the Linux kernel is 12KB (three times the Linux kernel page size of 4096 bytes). The latest patch released by AMD for future CPUs (probably based on Zen 5 or its successors) could increase the microcode size to 32KB, or 8 times the Linux kernel page size. indicates that there is
“Future AMD CPUs will have microcode patches beyond the current limit of three 4K pages.” statement Read by AMD. “It will increase significantly to avoid future size increases.”
The increased microcode patch size does not necessarily mean that the microcode for AMD’s Zen 5 CPUs will be more than 2.6x larger than the microcode for AMD’s Zen 4 processors. Nevertheless, it points to the fact that it gets bigger.
CPU microcode is the low-level code that defines how the CPU works. Microcode is, in large part, a step-by-step guide to how the CPU executes each machine code instruction. Microcode takes higher-level machine code instructions and breaks them down into simpler hardware-level instructions that the CPU can execute. CPU microcode can be updated frequently, allowing processor developers to fix bugs and security vulnerabilities after the CPU is introduced.
Microcode allows the CPU to handle more complex instructions that would be difficult or inefficient to implement directly in hardware. Therefore, the more complex the instruction set, the more complex the microcode. Therefore, if AMD implements complex new instruction set extensions into Zen 5 based products and their successors, they will have to scale up the microcode size.
Another reason for increasing the CPU microcode size is that AMD anticipates adding new features (instructions, optimizations, hardware bug fixes, security enhancements, etc.), resulting in a prohibitively expensive redesign of the entire CPU. because we want to do so without the need for On current and future process technology.
