Apple M1 Microarchitecture Research

Probably this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250780982_The_Valid...

They say the M1 may use a validation buffer instead of a re order buffer. This makes it somewhat clear if you know what a re order buffer is.

Processors basically do this: read instructions, execute them out of order to fully use cpu resources, put the instructions back in order along with their results, and then write results to memory. This way the “final state” follows the order of instructions.

The “put back in order” step is handled by the re order buffer. It is basically an online sort algorithm.

Fully sorting instructions after execution is simple and correct, but in extreme cases may be suboptimal; perhaps it doesn’t matter if the final state is exactly in order or just close to that. I believe the article is saying the M1 may just validate states as they are written rather than fully reordering.

The distinction you're making is more about _fundamental_ research vs. _applied_ research, but it is research nevertheless.

From the first hit I found on Google:

* Fundamental researches mainly aim to answer the questions of why, what or how and they tend to contribute the pool of fundamental knowledge in the research area.

* Opposite to fundamental research is applied research that aims to solve specific problems, thus findings of applied research do have immediate practical implications.

Just because other humans created the knowledge in question, doesn't make the search for that knowledge not research, if the knowledge isn't held by the general public in the first place, and if that knowledge requires independent gathering of data and interpretation to acquire.

I agree that Apple and the quirks in our society that encourage that secretive behavior has the effect of researchers independently replicating a small subset of Apple's work in a way that they'd be redirected to something more useful in a more open society. That doesn't make the independent researcher's work not research though.

Otherwise nearly the whole field of anthropology wouldn't exist or wouldn't be considered research.

> Lumping them together just cements the idea that the systems we built and navigate, for better or worse, are to be treated like natural laws that can't be argued with.

The systems we have built are pretty fixed in time. We can argue about how to change them going in the future, but we should also record, externally if need be like here, what has happened so that we can make better decisions going forward. Apple's choices for the M1 are arguably more set in stone than our conception of physics. We're able to retcon all of physics when we make changes to the standard model, but "what tradeoffs did Apple make in the M1" are pretty much done and set in stone (or silicon I guess).