Can anyone suggest a good reference which explains the operation of the ALU component of the 8088 CPU? Is that design out there somewhere? Thanks! Michael
All that I can think of is Ken's fairly recent look at the die of the 8086 processor, which doesn't go into much detail about the ALU. But his blog has lots of other content and I'm pretty sure he also did an in-depth look at the Z80's ALU a while back.
And what about the source code of the various PC emulators? PCE is targeted on the 5150/5160 so you don't have to filter out all the stuff meant for the 286 and better.
The 8086/88 also uses its ALU to perform the EA (effective address) calculations for memory operands e.g. [BX+SI+disp16] and similar; one of the enhancements NEC made in the V20 to speed it up a bit was providing a dedicated adder for EA generation.