- How the 8086 processor determines the length of an instruction (righto.com)
The Intel 8086 processor (1978) has a complicated instruction set with instructions ranging from one to six bytes long. This raises the question of how the processor knows the length of an instruction.1 The answer is that the 8086 uses an interesting combination of lookup ROMs and microcode to determine how many bytes to use for an instruction. In brief, the ROMs perform enough decoding to figure out if it needs one byte or two. After that, the microcode simply consumes instruction bytes as it needs them. Thus, nothing in the chip explicitly “knows” the length of an instruction. This blog post describes this process in more detail.
- Ali Khamenei (Wikipedia)
Ali Hosseini Khamenei (19 April 1939 – 28 February 2026) was an Iranian politician and Shia cleric who served as the second supreme leader of Iran from 1989 until his assassination in 2026. A member of the Khamenei family who held the title Grand Ayatollah, he previously served as the third president of Iran from 1981 to 1989. His 36-year tenure as supreme leader made him the longest-serving head of state in West Asia at the time of his death.
- Ali Khamenei (en.wikiquote.org)
Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei [Persian: سید علی حسینی خامنهای] (19 April 1939 – 28 February 2026) was an Iranian politician and Shia cleric who served as the second supreme leader of Iran from 1989 until his assassination in the 2026 Iran war. He previously served as the third president of Iran from 1981 to 1989. His tenure as supreme leader, spanning 36 years and six months, made him the longest-serving head of state in West Asia at the time of his death. He held the title of Ayatollah and was considered one of the world’s leading maraji’ of Twelver Shi’ism.