Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry
SMRTR summary
Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor in 1985, featuring a 32-bit architecture and 16-byte instruction prefetch queue. The prefetch queue fetches instructions from memory before needed, improving performance by utilizing idle memory bus time. It contains complex circuitry for incrementing memory pointers, aligning data, and extending signed numbers.
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