- 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.
- Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714 – 1788) (early-music.com)
As a German composer whose early works exemplified the grandeur of Baroque style and whose subsequent works evolved into pure Classicism, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s keyboard music offers a charming and historical look into the musical transition between two great eras of music history. Standing in the shadow of his famous father, Johann Sebastian Bach, C.P.E. Bach is sometimes overlooked by historians for his ground-breaking keyboard Sonatas and his significant contribution to Protestant Church music in the second half of the Eighteenth Century.