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What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

danluu.com

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Re: What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

#14
I would like to suggest that the classical taxonomy of RISC/CISC dichotomy is basically non-existent nowadays -- namely because both sides have influenced each other. It is well known that CISC has taken a lot of inspirations from RISC designs (such as having a lot more registers in x64), and RISC designs also taken some inspirations from CISC (such as having SIMD/vectorization units). In other words, the line between RISC and CISC has been very fine lately.

Also, at the end of the day, they all turned into μops. If I remember Jim Keller correctly, ARM and x86, they are basically the same in the back nowadays, its just the frontend and their decoding units are different. And that's why he strongly suggested AMD to also adapt Zen design with ARM ISA during his tenure there, oh I think it is called K12.

I think there is another blurry line between superscalar and VLIW architecture, too.

Re: What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

#16
post #12
post #11

What is "capabilities" supposed to mean?

Probably Capability based security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

Funny how in the 90s security was an enterprise feature and now better security and cryptography than we had in the 90s is on every $15 android phone.

Re: What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

#17
post #9

> Fancy type systems We are taking steps to this direction. By adding optional typing to dynamic languages Python and JavaScript/TypeScript. And then type checker tools and local programming style guides are making using these maybe less optional, and more mandatory.

IMO the day python types become mandatory there will be a fork.

It would be such a total betrayal of it's reason for existing that we would have to invent another untyped or duck-typed language again.

Re: What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

#18
I'd say that "pure Functional programming" has become a no.

But "Functional programming approach" has been subsumed into existing programming languages, e.g. records in Java. You get most of the benefit of FP while keeping all of the other good stuf from an imperative language.

Re: What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

#19
post #6

Fascinating about how ARM has made tremendous strides in the “high end” market since 2015. I would argue that I would categorize RISC as a “yes” with its absolute dominance on mobile and now moving into data center not to mention all the embedded use cases.

I think the battle between RISC and CISC is overshadowed by the battle between non-x86 and x86. On average are new designs more RISC than CISC? I don't know but that's different from numbers of chips of a certain type sold.

RISC showed what you could do with a clean sheet and the battle has really been about whether we can afford the cost of changing to a new instruction set just because it's better by a bit.

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