Inside the die of Intel's 8087 coprocessor chip, root of modern floating point

I plan to write more about the 8087. Are there any topics that you (HN readers) would be most interested in?

Can anyone recommend a good article or video (preferably video) that gets into how CPUs work at a somewhat fundamental level? Ideally geared towards someone who's generally familiar with computing concepts and not a total layman.

It's too bad that 80 bit precision has been abandoned.

Thanks for the great article. And I found a ton of other interesting stuff that will keep me reading for some time.

Didn't they just release the 8086?

Has a similar, very cool, reverse engineering analysis been done with peripheral heavy microcontrollers?

Wasn't Intel 8087 based on AMD 9511? I always thought Intel was responsible for x86 and AMD for x87 and x64.

I so seldom think at this level I had a couple questions about the following passage that I'm hoping someone could answer:

>"The transistor can be viewed as a switch, allowing current to flow between two diffusion regions called the source and drain. The transistor is controlled by the gate, made of a special type of silicon called polysilicon. A high signal voltage on the gate lets current flow between the source and drain, while a low signal voltage blocks current flow."

If current flows from the source to the drain, is the source terminal hardwired to the power rail and always receiving some nominal voltage? Also does the voltage applied to the gate in order to turn the switch on come from the drain of a neighboring transistor? Basically wired in a series?

I always see MOSFET transistors depicted in isolation and then the conventional logic gate shapes used when depicting specific circuits like adder, mux etc. I find it tough to visualize how the gate, source and drain terminals in transistors as they are depicted in this picture physically interconnect to form the logic gate. Is there a separate metal layer for each of source, gate, drain and ground?