One always remembers their first love. For me, that was i386DX running at screaming 40 MHz.
So, why am I having this senior moment remembering things from my youth? Well, Ken Shirriff decided to spend a bit of time, some acid, and a lot of patience in order to reverse engineer i386 processor logic cells. It's a fascinating read.
So, for all i386 afficienados, here are a few of his articles to read (in order of my choosing):
- Reverse engineering standard cell logic in the Intel 386 processor
- Examining the silicon dies of the Intel 386 processor
- Inside the Intel 386 processor die: the clock circuit
- Two interesting XOR circuits inside the Intel 386 processor
- Reverse engineering the barrel shifter circuit on the Intel 386 processor die