- Wallace Falls State Park highlights three plunging waterfalls on the Wallace River. The largest one drops 265 feet down a sheer face of moss-covered rock. The park’s busy, well-built trails are a testament to the hard work and persistence of those who dedicated themselves to its creation.
- Inside the 8086 processor’s instruction prefetch circuitry (righto.com)
The groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor was introduced by Intel in 1978 and led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and server computing. One way that the 8086 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 8086 from die photos and this blog post discusses what I’ve uncovered about the prefetch circuitry.