I started this project after becoming curious how hardware detection tools like CPU-Z work. When I looked up the developers of the software, CPUID, I learned that their namesake was also the name of an Assembly instruction that returns info about a machine’s CPU! Since my Computer Systems Organization class taught me about the inner workings of a processor and how Assembly code works, I really wanted to see if I could write my own code to utilize the CPUID instruction.

This project gave me the opportunity to work with both C++ and Assembly together, something I had also never done before. I learned how to interface between the two using what I had learned about passing arguments between functions in lower-level languages like C/C++ and Assembly. Being unfamiliar with highly technical documentation, it was also a learning experience navigating Intel’s developer manuals to piece together how the CPUID instruction works.

Needless to say, modern processors are extremely complex with an immense amount of “feature flags”, so I was never able to implement the parsing of every possible “leaf” of info the CPU can return. Nevertheless, this project stands as a proof-of-concept to show that I can parse dense documentation and implement hybrid low-level and high-level solutions that interface with real hardware. It was truly a fun project to hack on!