- 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.
- Schrödinger equation (Wikipedia)
The Schrödinger equation is a linear partial differential equation that governs the wave function of a quantum-mechanical system. Its discovery was a significant landmark in the development of quantum mechanics. It is named after Erwin Schrödinger, who postulated the equation in 1925 and published it in 1926, forming the basis for the work that resulted in his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.