- When redirects are implemented, change to a standard URL for Wikimedia-hosted pictures.
- I drove into the neighborhood to explore a large green area on the map. Here was a white fire hydrant.
- 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.
