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Fanael's random ruminations
Personal blog · fanael.github.iohardwareprogramming
Fanael's random ruminations is a personal blog at fanael.github.io about hardware and programming. Since 2023, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4 times, most often “The legend of “x86 CPUs decode instructions into RISC form internally””. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its explanations of x86 microarchitecture, such as whether x86 chips execute RISC-like internal instructions. One commenter called one of its write-ups a great read.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Latest posts on Fanael's random ruminations
Most-linked posts?
- The legend of “x86 CPUs decode instructions into RISC form internally”2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-18
What Hacker News says?
That's weird, I looked it up earlier and found the P6 (Pentium Pro) was the first to actually make the xor optimization into a zero clock operation. https://fanael.github.io/archives/topic-microarchitecture-ar...
Comment linking /archives/topic-microarchitecture-archeology.html
on “Why xor eax, eax?”Submitted The legend of “x86 CPUs decode instructions into RISC form internally” as a story · 5 points
HN discussionPretty much every high-power high-efficiency core (whether x86 or arm or PowerPC or whatever) breaks instructions up into an extremely reduced instruction and executes those. There was a point where Pentium processors were effectively just executing RISC. There's a great write-up about it here: https://fanael.github.io/is-x86-risc-internally.html
Comment linking /is-x86-risc-internally.html
on “Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?”Submitted .NET object initialization is surprisingly slow (compared to Java) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion