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Intel x86 cores have had Last Branch Records (LBRs) and Branch Trace Store (BTS) since at least Merom in 2006 [1][2]. Nowadays, there's Processor Trace (PT) or Precise Event-Based …

I work remotely on a small-ish research team. Almost all of my immediate colleagues are in the US or Western Europe. Most (all?) of the folks on P- and E-Core Engineering that I wo…

No; in fact, we're doing more of our core development in the US than at some previous points in our history. (I work at Intel, but this is just my personal observation.)

At Berkeley, course numbers >100 are upper-division, and those <100 are lower-division, introductory classes. Especially in the CS department, the upper-division courses are far fr…

X11 forwarding for Cadence's chip layout tooling is practically unusable nowadays! Sub-1 FPS, even on a reasonable 1 Gbps pipe with only 3-4 ms ping. I had to use NoMachine when I …

(Disclaimer: I work at Intel, but not on server products. Opinions are my own.) There's a lot more that goes into a server platform than just the cores, for instance: the BIOS code…

Further optimization are certainly possible, especially as the hardware improves and gains additional capabilities. With regards to your suggestion, this is essentially what alread…

Check out angr [1], a symbolic execution engine, and claripy [2], its frontend to SMT solvers like z3. Depending on your background, I probably wouldn't describe angr as "for newbi…

Most assemblers for Intel syntax will let you write: add eax, [4] if you desire. Indeed, many disassemblers will follow suit in unambiguous cases. IDA, for example, does this.

Another approach with which I've had success is to use something like PCBite's probes [1] to stab the little bits of solder sticking out the sides of the WSON package. PCBite's pro…

This is one of my favorite episodes. I always thought the thin veiling helped to demonstrate the absurdity of both situations -- perhaps it was even done intentionally for that rea…

Erm, I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but they certainly are not giving these away to youtubers. This is a >$1 million instrument that isn't even very useful for hobbyist el…

They made _vacuum tubes_ survive 20,000g during WWII [1]. Modern military applications have guidance computers packed into individual bullets [2]! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

More specifically, it's a system on a _package_. A TLB lives on the _die_, though, with one in each core.

> Real-world IPC is something like 3x (!) that of Intel right now - obviously it also clocks lower That's the problem, though -- if you clock yourself much lower, of course you can…

Great to hear that Intel is finally competitive in this space again. If process improvements are coming on time (and they are, if Pat is to be believed), perhaps Intel can finally …

It generally goes the other way around -- programmers and compilers settle on a few idiomatic ways to do something, and new cores are built to execute those quickly. Because RISC-V…

Oh no, you're absolutely right. My sleep-deprived brain has confused the names -- thanks for the heads up. I'll edit my post.

(Edited because I transposed "mutex" and "semaphore" in my mind.) A mutex is a lock -- if multiple users attempt to access a resource simultaneously, they each attempt to acquire t…

Thank you! It means a lot to me to be able to share what I learned. I don't know much of anything about the AMD side of things -- I'm just a poor college student and my investment …

Oh boy. Yes, I spent nearly a year trying to work with the Direct Connect Interface (DCI), Intel's implementation of this. It's a long, complicated, difficult, and frustrating proc…

Wow, really great stuff! I wrote something similar for my high school a few years ago (back when I was less experienced with programming -- ack!). I used a library called JSCPP to …

It sounds like he's defending _a_ caste system, but probably not the one you're thinking of.

I'm looking to automatically transcribe some audio recorded from my handheld voice recorder in a low-noise environment. It doesn't have to be perfect -- just good enough so that I …