by Patrick Stakem (Author)
This new effort was triggered by the introduction of a new chip for the 40th anniversary of the x86 architecture. Who would have thought the architecture would remain commercially viable at the time? This gives us a unique opportunity to see how Moore's law has held up over time, and to compare and contrast the 40-year old part with the current one, to understand where we are coming from, and heading to. I removed a lot of the material from the original on the basics, including the number systems, data structures, I/O methods, etc. These are generic, and can be found in many Introduction to Computer Science texts. I have added details on the 40th anniversary chip, did a compare and contrast with the original 8086, and included some material on AMD's rival x86-architecture chips.