Tag Archives: x86

Exercises in Emulation: Xbox 360’s FMA Instruction

Posted on March 20, 2019 by

Years ago I worked in the Xbox 360 group at Microsoft. We were thinking about releasing a new console, and we thought it would be nice if that console could run the games of the previous console. Emulation is always … Continue reading →

Posted in Floating Point | Tagged , , , , | 23 Comments

The Surprising Subtleties of Zeroing a Register

Posted on December 29, 2012 by

Zeroing out a CPU register seems like the simplest and most basic operation imaginable, but in fact x86 CPUs contain a surprising amount of special logic to make this operation run smoothly. The most obvious way of zeroing an x86 … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming | Tagged , , , | 30 Comments