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Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
I wish we knew what kind of chip it was. If it was a microprocessor, all modern high-complexity chips have “microcode” - basically, a cpu within a cpu - that allow instructions that are supposed to be executed in hardware (transistors, logic gates, etc) with a patch of instructions. Both AMD and Intel have routinely patched their chips with BIOS upgrades that first load any microcode revisions before starting up. It wouldn’t take much of a stretch to design “poisoned” microcode.
On the other hand, there was an illegal instruction (an unimplemented op code) on the Motorola 6800 that put the bus in an illegal state and locked the chip up so that it needed a power-on or hard reset - the infamous HCF (Halt and Catch Fire) instruction.