80386 Early Start Memory Access

Small Things Retro Retro gaming and computing experiments by nand2mario Home Projects 80386 Early Start Memory Access June 23, 2026 by nand2mario 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 perf