- Remote Sucia Island, tucked away in the northwestern tip of Washington, is home to the only dinosaur fossil ever found in the state. With this discovery, Washington has finally joined the club of states with dinosaur discoveries (there are only 14 states where no dinosaurs have been discovered yet!). This tiny island measures less than 1 square mile in area, though numerous hidden coves and protected bays, and the fact that the island can only be reached by boat, make it a wondrous combination of mystery, discovery, and tranquility. With forests, gravel beaches, and shoreline outcrops, there is much to explore. Geology enthusiasts who visit the island can observe rocks ripe with ancient life, but you may not take any fossils. And if you need a peaceful nap after a day of exploring, don’t worry—Fossil Bay is right around the corner from Snoring Bay.
- The 8086 processor’s microcode pipeline from die analysis (righto.com)
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978, and its influence still remains through the popular x86 architecture. The 8086 was a fairly complex microprocessor for its time, implementing instructions in microcode with pipelining to improve performance. This blog post explains the microcode operations for a particular instruction, “ADD immediate”. As the 8086 documentation will tell you, this instruction takes four clock cycles to execute. But looking internally shows seven clock cycles of activity. How does the 8086 fit seven cycles of computation into four cycles? As I will show, the trick is pipelining.