- The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a physics textbook based on some lectures by Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate who has sometimes been called “The Great Explainer”. The lectures were presented before undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), during 1961–1963. The book’s co-authors are Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands.
- The Intel 8088 processor’s instruction prefetch circuitry: a look inside (righto.com)
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM’s decision to use the 8088 processor in the IBM PC (1981) was a critical point in computer history, leading to the dominance of the x86 architecture that continues to the present.1 One way that the 8086 and 8088 increased performance was by prefetching: the processor fetches instructions from memory before they are needed, so the processor can execute them without waiting on the relatively slow memory. I’ve been reverse-engineering the 8088 from die photos and this blog post discusses what I’ve uncovered about the prefetch circuitry.