I had so much fun reading this (Pentium architecture)

This reminded me of why I love CPUs/hardware that much and how humble we should be in respect to the inherent complexity of the hardware we’re coding our shiny, highly abstracted apps.

The parts about how much % the legacy x86 ISA took out of the chip, the clever tricks to issue multiple instructions per clock out of order, the issues with the external L2 cache in PII and how they “fixed” it the Pentium II Xeon, the extremely bad branch prediction of 70% (holy :cow2:), the epic P6 uArch incarnated as the legendary Pentium Pro (from which the modern Nehalem uArch is derived from, thank the gods it wasn’t NetBurst) … mind bending candy.

We’re running code on magic sand but first we had to put lighting into the magic sand :rofl:

2 Likes