Monthly Archives: December 2017

AMD64 APM Archive Online

Thanks to Konstantin Belousov, the OS/2 Museum AMD64 APM (Architecture Programmer’s Manual) is now available online. Big thanks to blog readers who recently supplied several missing revisions of the documents. This is a nearly complete archive of all published AMD64 … Continue reading

Posted in AMD, AMD64, Documentation | 2 Comments

Undocumented 8086 Opcodes, Part I

This is a guest post by Raúl Gutiérrez Sanz This multi-part document is about undocumented 8086 processor opcodes and their behavior. Most of the document will likely apply to the 8088 processor as well, but this has not been verified. … Continue reading

Posted in 8086/8088, Intel, Undocumented | 13 Comments

How Fast Again?

Or, Yet Another Wikipedia Mystery Looking for something on the Wikipedia USB page, a detail caught my eye. In the version history section, both the table and the text claim that the original 1996 USB 1.0 specification defined 1.5 Mbps … Continue reading

Posted in Documentation, USB | 36 Comments

AMD64 Manual Vol. 3 Rev. 3.24 Anyone?

AMD tricked me. After not updating anything for months, they updated the AMD64 documentation and not only that, they updated Volume 3 (instruction reference) twice within a few weeks. First to revision 3.24 in November, then 3.25 in December. I … Continue reading

Posted in AMD, Documentation | 3 Comments

How Apple Created Hackintosh, Part II

There is every indication that throughout the early 2000s, Apple internally built and ran all of OS X on x86 PCs (it’s also something Steve Jobs himself mentioned in 2005). Otherwise why would Apple have x86 drivers for AC’97 audio … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, Intel, OS X, PC history, Pre-release | 10 Comments

HTT Means Hyper-Threading, Right?

In a logical, ordered world, the HTT bit in CPUID would indicate a processor with Hyper-Threading Technology enabled. But of course the world with Intel inside is anything but logical. The actual meaning of the HTT bit changed several times … Continue reading

Posted in Documentation, Intel, Pentium 4 | 13 Comments