Manuals

Yesterday I was talking about processors and added a picture of the 80486 book...This is only an inch and half (a bit under 4cm) thick. It describes everything the processor does from the programming side of the world. (A different datasheet goes over the electrical connections to the chip) This is a pretty thick book.My co-worker noted the same book for the current processors. I looked it up. Intel is more than happy to let you download the new one in a PDF.It's a lot thicker -- if you wanted to sacrifice a tree and print it out.It's 4,744 pages long.The datasheet is less than 100 pages.I'm not going to say you should read it... but it's an interesting thing to ponder -- that something's behavior can so exactly be described, and that it can take that much to do the describing.