- Long Beach is a beachfront city in southwestern Washington State. It is the largest city on the Long Beach Peninsula, claimed to be the longest continuous beach in the United States.
- Southwest Washington (Wikivoyage)
Southwest Washington is a lush, forested region of Washington State. This part of the state is along north bank of the Columbia River, from where it carves a gorge through the Cascade Mountains, past the busy communities opposite of Portland, to its wide mouth at the Pacific Ocean. Its stretch of coastline features extensive sandy beaches as well as sheltered wetlands, and its interior is covered in evergreen forest punctuated with prominent volcanic peaks.
- Latches inside: Reverse-engineering the Intel 8086’s instruction register (righto.com)
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop and server computing today. But it is still simple enough that its circuitry can be studied under the microscope and understood. In this post, I explain the implementation of a dynamic latch, a circuit that holds a single bit. The 8086 has over 80 latches scattered throughout the chip, holding a variety of important processor state bits,1 but I’ll focus on the eight latches that implement the instruction register and hold the instruction that is being executed.