80386 Early Start Memory Access

🫧 Open on Bubbles When Intel designed the 80386, they gave it a trick for hiding memory latency: Early Start . Instead of waiting for an instruction to reach its memory micro-op, the 386 begins the next instruction's address work — effective address, segment relocation, the bus cycle — in the last cycle of the current instruction. Intel put it at about 9% of overall performance. It is also the source of the POPAD bug.