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