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Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry
In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the ...
Prefetching takes advantage of times when the memory bus is otherwise idle, minimizing conflict with other instructions that are reading or writing data. Unlike regular static gates, dynamic logic is controlled by the processor's clock signals and depends on capacitance in the circuit to hold data. The bus takes the lowest 8 bits from the prefetch queue's alignment network and sends this byte to a buffer (the small square at the head of the red arrow).
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