21–30 of 56 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't confuse powerful with power-hungry
It's just physics. For a given transistor, more transistors @ higher frequency = more power. At the ultra low end people are using processors that run using energy collected from stray radio waves. While a better design and instruction set help unlike desktop computing the standard is already lean.
CPU built from 74 series TTL chips running web server: http://www.homebrewcpu.com/
My opinion may be in the minority here but I think the crux of this article is misguided. It's like a farmer saying, "I long for the days before the combustion engine because I love planting 3 acres by hand". I also think the two basic premises of the article are just plain wrong. There are plenty of examples where people have written their own operating system from scratch for the x86, there have been articles poste…
I disagree. That would the case if I were to say: "Please take away this Mac Pro and all the wonderful software because what I really want is a Z-80". I'm not saying that today's processors are too complex to understand, I'm saying that the software running in the machine in front of me is too complex. I wouldn't mind writing assembly code for a modern processor at all. But if we are talking about what's likely to ma…
While I like to mention my much beloved Apple II, even a 8088 PC running DOS is somewhat understandable.
"Don was responsible for the LM P60's (Lunar Descent), while I was responsible for the LM P40's (which were) all other LM powered flight". Two men were able to write all that code and understand its operation. Is this probably why we don't use more advanced technology for space flight today; it's too complex? I've always wondered just how much more we could accomplish if we used modern computing technology in space s…
My opinion may be in the minority here but I think the crux of this article is misguided. It's like a farmer saying, "I long for the days before the combustion engine because I love planting 3 acres by hand". I also think the two basic premises of the article are just plain wrong. There are plenty of examples where people have written their own operating system from scratch for the x86, there have been articles poste…
This article isn't talking about efficiency, it's talking about joy -- the basis of all hobbies.
My opinion may be in the minority here but I think the crux of this article is misguided. It's like a farmer saying, "I long for the days before the combustion engine because I love planting 3 acres by hand". I also think the two basic premises of the article are just plain wrong. There are plenty of examples where people have written their own operating system from scratch for the x86, there have been articles poste…
It's quite probable that x86 processors are more complex than they need to be-- at least, the instruction set is more complicated than is necessary. CISC architectures are meant to make life easier for assembly language programmers, letting you do things like load, multiply and store in a single command. In practice that hasn't been all that valuable, because programmers just use higher level languages like C when th…
Folks designing processors haven't believed that since before the Pentium was introduced. (I went to dinner with some of the MIPS principals right after the first Pentium tech talk. Their conclusion was that everyone would finally figure out that the RISC/CISC wars were over and they'd lost.)
There are lots of things that go into designing a high performance processor. Instruction decoding and its consequences have little effect/cost compared to everything else.
Having worked as an electrical engineer creating hardware, this seems strange. Obviously the computer designer had to create an API of some sort, even if they did it in transistors. Computers aren't given to us from above -- there are people creating them too.
The problem is, of course, that all abstractions are leaky, and we've piled abstraction after abstraction on top of the hardware. So it's not unusual to have four or five levels of stuff between you and the machine. Adding to that is the problem of multi-cores: it's not just one machine operating anymore. Each piece is deterministic, sure, but as all the pieces interoperate in real-time that determinism can be so hidden as to be effectively non-existent.
Languages are going to be able to help to some degree, but at the end of the day machines are just going to keep getting more and more complex and our understanding of them shallower and shallower.
It'll be interesting to see if there is a major hardware refactoring that takes place anytime soon. I imagine for AI to work we're going to need it.
I can no longer understand the computer I am forced to spend my days in the lonely struggle against an implacable and yet deterministic foe: another man's APIs. Having worked as an electrical engineer creating hardware, this seems strange. Obviously the computer designer had to create an API of some sort, even if they did it in transistors. Computers aren't given to us from above -- there are people creating them too…