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When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

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Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#71

Post by astrange »

Divver wrote: post #65

Hmm at Berkeley 10-14 years ago during undergrad we used MIPS in both our computer architecture class and compilers class and I wouldn’t call it obscure. Uncommon yes but not obscure. It had a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) which at the time was considered academic but not popular in real world computers since CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) ISA like amd64 was all t…

CISC/RISC is not a useful distinction and I wouldn't call ARMv8 (at least the 64-bit kind) especially RISC.

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#72

Post by TOMDM »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #62

Universities aren’t corporate training grounds. The job here is to teach you the concepts involved in CPU architecture and using the most general purpose architectures possible that have been developed over millions of person hours to cover every task possible would be a very inefficient way to do this.

Imagine teaching a legal class a fictional legal system. Philosophically there's likely great value but I doubt people wanting to practice law would favour courses with that as a focus.

I agree that University courses shouldn't purely be vocational training; there's value to personal growth and pure academia that doesn't have a 1-1 overlap with the corporate world.

That said I certainly appreciate that my time at University has been largely applicable at work. Doing both where possible is likely a valuable goal.

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#73

Post by GarvielLoken »

onethought wrote: post #68
simonbarker87 wrote: post #62

Universities aren’t corporate training grounds. The job here is to teach you the concepts involved in CPU architecture and using the most general purpose architectures possible that have been developed over millions of person hours to cover every task possible would be a very inefficient way to do this.

> Universities aren’t corporate training grounds. So the ridiculous fees that correlate to average wages of the profession you graduate into is just a weird coincidence?

There are no fees for University. See how fun it is when you assume how it is in your country is the same in all the other countries in the world?

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#74

Post by outop »

TOMDM wrote: post #72
simonbarker87 wrote: post #62

Universities aren’t corporate training grounds. The job here is to teach you the concepts involved in CPU architecture and using the most general purpose architectures possible that have been developed over millions of person hours to cover every task possible would be a very inefficient way to do this.

Imagine teaching a legal class a fictional legal system. Philosophically there's likely great value but I doubt people wanting to practice law would favour courses with that as a focus. I agree that University courses shouldn't purely be vocational training; there's value to personal growth and pure academia that doesn't have a 1-1 overlap with the corporate world. That said I certainly appreciate that my time at Uni…

Many law courses spend time on Roman law, and on archaic English law.

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#75

Post by bombcar »

DeathArrow wrote: post #54

Even Knuth uses the MIX assembly language for his hypothetical MIX CPU in The Art of Computer Programming, and those series of books are higher level than Compute Architecture courses.

Those books are also older and have outlasted many CPU architectures.

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#76

Post by yuliyp »

onethought wrote: post #68
simonbarker87 wrote: post #62

Universities aren’t corporate training grounds. The job here is to teach you the concepts involved in CPU architecture and using the most general purpose architectures possible that have been developed over millions of person hours to cover every task possible would be a very inefficient way to do this.

> Universities aren’t corporate training grounds. So the ridiculous fees that correlate to average wages of the profession you graduate into is just a weird coincidence?

At least for undergraduate studies, most universities have the same tuition regardless of major (outside of lab fees for courses which need lab materials). The tuition of a particular university is more related to its prestige level than the particular majors its students choose.

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#77

Post by creshal »

bobim wrote: post #53
inkyoto wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

x86 should be taught as a follow-up course in the following semester as an example of how not to design a CPU architecture, specifically from the long term evolution perspective. It would have been fine if x86 ceased to exist after 80486 or 80586, yet it has persevered and has continued to cause trouble with an incessant stream of extensions supplanting the previous generations, or expanding or «enhancing» them: MMX,…

To my understanding Intel tried to move from x86 with Itanium. That's the consumers who wanted it to linger around.

For some obscure reason, consumers preferred working compilers and higher performance hardware.

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#78

Post by creshal »

inkyoto wrote: post #56
anonymoushn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SVE didn't standardize a shuffle usable for processing strings without specializing your code to a specific vector width until October 2022, so it seems a bit unreasonable to expect Intel to have had it in 1997.

Shuffle is different, it is not a foundational SIMD instruction, it is actually a good example of an extension that can be added later as an add-on that does not require a complete code rewrite. Whereas each of the MMX, SSE and AVX extensions was effectively a new instruction set, AND each had its own register set – 64, 128, 256 and 512 bit registers. Later generations (i.e. AVX2 and AVX-512) are better thought out,…

Is MMX even still present in silicon, or just shunted away to some microcode?

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#79

Post by bobim »

creshal wrote: post #77
bobim wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my understanding Intel tried to move from x86 with Itanium. That's the consumers who wanted it to linger around.

For some obscure reason, consumers preferred working compilers and higher performance hardware.

I could not use the Itanium server we had at work as it was reserved for the elite. I can say that my 32 bits single core P4 computer was not faster at number crunching.

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#80

Post by onethought »

GarvielLoken wrote: post #73
onethought wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Universities aren’t corporate training grounds. So the ridiculous fees that correlate to average wages of the profession you graduate into is just a weird coincidence?

There are no fees for University. See how fun it is when you assume how it is in your country is the same in all the other countries in the world?

So there are no universities that do what I’ve mentioned?

See how fun it is when you assume how it is in your country is the same in all the other countries in the world?

So in your country where the government pays the fees (I’m going to assume that is what you mean by “no fees” as I imagine academics are paid in this country), they do so because they care so much about the wellbeing of academia… or do you think the higher income graduates earn plays a role in increased taxation? Or do you live in a country without income tax?

Funny how people want to attack what you say, rather than refute your actual point: Universities (today) are corporate training grounds.

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