- Reverse-engineering a carry-lookahead adder in the Pentium (righto.com)
Addition is harder than you’d expect, at least for a computer. Computers use multiple types of adder circuits with different tradeoffs of size versus speed. In this article, I reverse-engineer an 8-bit adder in the Pentium’s floating point unit. This adder turns out to be a carry-lookahead adder, in particular, a type known as “Kogge-Stone.“1 In this article, I’ll explain how a carry-lookahead adder works and I’ll show how the Pentium implemented it. Warning: lots of Boolean logic ahead.
- Pictor (Wikipedia)
Pictor is a constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere, located between the star Canopus and the Large Magellanic Cloud. Its name is Latin for painter, and is an abbreviation of the older name Equuleus Pictoris (the “painter’s easel”). Normally represented as an easel, Pictor was named by Abbé Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in the 18th century. The constellation’s brightest star is Alpha Pictoris, a white main-sequence star around 97 light-years away from Earth. Pictor also hosts RR Pictoris, a cataclysmic variable star system that flared up as a nova, reaching apparent (visual) magnitude 1.2 in 1925 before fading into obscurity.