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by guerrilla 1703 days ago
None of it is open hardware but some of it has been reverse engineered. I know some x86 CPU's have had their microcode reverse engineered, starting with the 8086 but also AMD's K8 and K10. There are lots of die photos of the 486DX chips and a patent says the microcode was pretty small (only 250 "lines", 12kbits.) About the POWER CPUs I have no idea. They're RISC so do they even have microcode?