x86

This video uses disassembly and the WinDbg debugging tool to reveal that the eight mystery bytes that appear when calloc allocates memory in an x86 environment are actually the entry header of the Windows heap manager, containing information such as the current block size and the previous block size.

A retrospective analysis argues that the 8086 segmented memory architecture was a clever design that could have scaled gracefully, but software developers' insistence on treating memory as a flat space led to its perceived flaws.

The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group has published the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification, defining new x86 instructions and register state for accelerating matrix multiplication and reduced precision data formats in machine learning workloads.

MONOLITH is an experimental non-Unix operating system for x86 architecture, available as an open-source project on Codeberg.

A developer documents their journey of writing a custom x86 BIOS from scratch to boot DOS on a Behringer DDX3216 mixing console, which uses an AMD Elan SC300 386 SoC.

A blog post detailing how to run the Gemma 4 AI model on a 10-year-old Xeon server with only CPU and DDR3 RAM, using customized llama.cpp optimizations.

Raymond Chen explores why x86 compilers universally prefer "xor eax,eax" over "sub eax,eax" to zero a register, attributing it to historical momentum and slightly safer flag behavior rather than technical superiority.

Theseus is a new static Windows/x86 emulator that translates programs at compile-time rather than interpreting or JIT-compiling them at runtime, representing an alternative approach to traditional emulation architectures.

A detailed technical analysis of the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) control circuitry, explaining how microcode and control signals coordinate to perform 28 different operations.

Detailed reverse engineering of the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry, explaining the incrementer, alignment network, and dynamic logic used.