With generative AI being all the rage nowadays, it's not often you hear about it being used much outside of artwork and coding. Japanese tech blogger Ikejima bucked that trend when he realized he'd never built an x86 motherboard, and proceeded to enlist Google's Gemini to help him do exactly that.
The scope was simple: to design and implement a motherboard for an Intel 8086 CPU, the chip that spawned the x86 architecture back in 1987. This was Ikejima's second attempt, as he'd previously tried it with an Intel 8088 clone, a cheaper variant of the 8086. That previous attempt failed as the 8088 required 5 V power (while the accompanying hardware ran on 3.3 V), and didn't take kindly to being debugged due to clock timing headaches.
