80386 Early Start Memory Access

241 · Nand2mario · June 23, 2026, 6:20 a.m.
Summary
The blog post discusses Intel's early design innovation in the 80386 microprocessor, specifically the "Early Start" technique that allows the processor to hide memory latency and improve performance by starting the address calculation of the next instruction before the current one finishes. It notes that this feature contributed about 9% to overall performance and mentions the POPAD bug associated with it.