| Title | Reverse Engineering the Intel 386 Processor's Register Cell | |
| Date | Monday November 13 2023, @05:29AM | |
| Author | hubie | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
https://www.righto.com/2023/11/reverse-engineering-intel-386.html
The groundbreaking Intel 386 processor (1985) was the first 32-bit processor in the x86 line. It has numerous internal registers: general-purpose registers, index registers, segment selectors, and more specialized registers. In this blog post, I look at the silicon die of the 386 and explain how some of these registers are implemented at the transistor level. The registers that I examined are implemented as static RAM, with each bit stored in a common 8-transistor circuit, known as "8T". Studying this circuit shows the interesting layout techniques that Intel used to squeeze two storage cells together to minimize the space they require.
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printed from SoylentNews, Reverse Engineering the Intel 386 Processor's Register Cell on 2025-03-15 10:41:08