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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

Author here for all your 8086 questions :-)

By the way, HN's title editing makes the title appear a bit strange. Of course flip-flops are implemented in the processor. The article describes how they are implemented.

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I just wanted to express gratitude for the amazing work you're doing. As someone with no hardware background, I learnt a lot from reading your blog, and I marvel at the amount of collective human intelligence packed into all the tiny chips surrounding our daily lives.

Thanks! Yes, it's amazing how much effort is packed into tiny chips, especially when you consider that the 8086 was 45 years ago.

You're right, I edited the title. This HN misfeature regularly makes me furious.

Understanding that the wires are used as capacitors makes the tiny scale of the tiny electronics inside chips make sense.

I feel inside-the-sausage-factory enlightenment. Which practically speaking might be the best kind I will experience. Thank you.

Most of the capacitance is likely the gate capacitance at the input of the inverters.

Thanks, the high bit for me is that there are not tiny discrete capacitors inside.

It changed my mental model. And the new model is less complicated.

I've toyed with the idea of a flip-flop that captures the input on both rising and falling edges. Doing this at the gate level seems inefficient, so I've wondered if there is a better way to design it, and if anyone uses such a thing in production. What do you think?

Double sided flip flops are used in DDR SDRAM and many other applications. https://docs.xilinx.com/r/en-US/am010-versal-selectio/Double...

This is where the double in "double data rate" comes from.

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