DigiNews

Summary

This post details the 80386 Early Start memory access technique and its implementation in the z386 FPGA core, showing how overlapping memory operations with instruction addressing yields performance gains similar to a modern CPU. It covers memory pipeline optimizations, store queue improvements, frontend widening, and careful clock-rate maintenance, ultimately achieving ao486-class performance in a non-pipelined open-source core. The write-up also discusses correctness versus wholesale 386-accurate behavior and invites community collaboration.