latinized bayer designation
- A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die’s silicon (righto.com)
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and server computing. While reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos, a particular circuit caught my eye because its physical layout on the die didn’t match the surrounding circuitry. This circuit turns out to implement special functionality for a couple of instructions, subtlely changing the way they interacted with interrupts. Some web searching revealed that this behavior was changed by Intel in 1978 to fix a problem with early versions of the 8086 chip. By studying the die, we can get an idea of how Intel dealt with bugs in the 8086 microprocessor.
- Beid (stars.astro.illinois.edu)
BEID (Omicron-1 Eridani). In the middle of the first southerly turning of Eridanus (the River) lie a seeming pair of fourth magnitude stars, Beid and Keid, which Bayer placed far down in the Greek alphabet as Omicron-1 and Omicron-2.