41–50 of 80 posts
Where are all those people who for years (or since M1) were claiming that x86 is dead because ARM ISA (magically) offers significantly better energy-efficiency than x86 ISA. Of course they ignored things like node advantage, but who cares? ;) Meanwhile industry veterans were claiming something different and turns out they were right https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-... Asking which - x86 or…
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> is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++? This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. They make parsing harder and once the types are non-trivial, they are absurdly hard to read and write. The case in point being non-trivial function pointers in C. The syntax for declaring a function pointer of a type that returns a function pointer is hi…
> This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. I found your comment extremely funny. You singled out the language which is not only one of the most popular languages ever designed but also the one whose syntax inspired or was straight out cloned by the bulk of the world's most popular programming languages. Yes, the programming language defined in the 70s isn't perfect and has…
Please quote the specific claim you think is unbelievable.
(I assume you don't mean the declarations claim because you didn't even disagree with it.)
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> is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++? This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. They make parsing harder and once the types are non-trivial, they are absurdly hard to read and write. The case in point being non-trivial function pointers in C. The syntax for declaring a function pointer of a type that returns a function pointer is hi…
> This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. I found your comment extremely funny. You singled out the language which is not only one of the most popular languages ever designed but also the one whose syntax inspired or was straight out cloned by the bulk of the world's most popular programming languages. Yes, the programming language defined in the 70s isn't perfect and has…
Or, more politely, a primer on how to confuse first-mover advantage with being any good.
C is abysmal by today’s standards, it being the first popular language for weak computers is literally what’s keeping it popular. Popularity is very valuable but please don’t confuse it with being good.
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It doesn't necessarily use half the power. But it does have greater than 2x in perf/watt and it has noticeably faster ST performance.
Aren't those roughly equivalent in a cpu which dynamically varies its clock speed and power consumption in response to compute demand?
Where are all those people who for years (or since M1) were claiming that x86 is dead because ARM ISA (magically) offers significantly better energy-efficiency than x86 ISA. Of course they ignored things like node advantage, but who cares? ;) Meanwhile industry veterans were claiming something different and turns out they were right https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-... Asking which - x86 or…
It annoys me too, especially when the explanation is: “because RISC simpler so it is faster, duh”. However x64 is at disadvantage for instruction decoding (it’s difficult to decode multiple variable length instructions in parallel), and secondly the guarantees for memory coherence across cores. Both come with an extra burden intel can’t eliminate for backward compatibility.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++? This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. They make parsing harder and once the types are non-trivial, they are absurdly hard to read and write. The case in point being non-trivial function pointers in C. The syntax for declaring a function pointer of a type that returns a function pointer is hi…
> This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. I found your comment extremely funny. You singled out the language which is not only one of the most popular languages ever designed but also the one whose syntax inspired or was straight out cloned by the bulk of the world's most popular programming languages. Yes, the programming language defined in the 70s isn't perfect and has…
Back in the 70s, they didn't know as much about writing parsers as we do now. The field was much younger.
There is a reason that Go's declaration syntax is not based on C's, despite Go being created by one of the co-creators of C.
> which is the exact opposite of your unbelievable claim.
I'm not making claims, I'm stating facts. Parsing C declarations is difficult. Writing C declarations is difficult. Reading non-trivial C declarations is difficult. For examples of this in action read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_vexing_parse.
C++'s horrific syntaxial complexity is the ultimate end of C-style decls. C++'s syntax is, again, objectively overly complicated for what it does. The reason it is overly complicated it because of the syntax it inherited from C.
C got some things right, mostly around ease of porting to different architectures. However, 50 years later we know a lot more about how to design programming languages.
C is not perfect, and even when it was created, better designed programming languages existed. However C was cheap and good enough, and because it was easy to port, it spread to lots of platforms.
FWIW I started my career in C/C++ compilers, I have first hand experience with these topics. I love C as a language, but I also acknowledge it is not perfect. The machines it was designed to run on in the 70s were not the height of Computer Engineering and C is not the height of programming language design.
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Probably not, Intel does a pretty decent job regulating power consumption as long as you don't modify the power profiles or fuck with ACPI. Distributions or third-party nagware might ruin the battery, but that goes for any laptop that's required to install Teams or McAfee. Loading up powertop on my i7 6600u reports an idle draw of 5.5w with my browser open playing music. I think that's pretty damn good, for an old-is…
> Probably not, Intel does a pretty decent job regulating power consumption as long as you don't modify the power profiles or fuck with ACPI. That assumes the motherboard vendor implemented ACPI properly, and most don't , you're often lucky to have something that is able to keep Windows alive enough to pass certifications. Linux, xBSD or macOS compatibility? Forget it unless you're talking servers with support contra…
Right now I am listening to music on this computer while I work on another computer. When the screen turns off on this computer the headphones get switched to headset (telecommunications) mode and the music quality goes down... On a desktop computer where saving power is not a big issue and I certainly don't want worse audio just because the screen powered off.
It's been a long term issue that USB devices will not work properly if USB power management is enabled and that's scary when some of those devices are mass storage devices that could corrupt data.
As a single vendor, I trust Apple better to get things like this right, but I don't particularly like MacOS.
Battery life is based on playing a 720p video file so most of the expended power will be in the video decoder and screen not the actual CPU. It's also dependent on the battery size in the laptop being tested so pretty much impossible to compare on any like for like basis.
Where is the video decoder unit located though?
Also, the codec being decoded matters a lot. H.264 is trivial to decode at this point while something like AV1 will require a bit more power to decode.
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> This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. I found your comment extremely funny. You singled out the language which is not only one of the most popular languages ever designed but also the one whose syntax inspired or was straight out cloned by the bulk of the world's most popular programming languages. Yes, the programming language defined in the 70s isn't perfect and has…
> your unbelievable claim Please quote the specific claim you think is unbelievable. (I assume you don't mean the declarations claim because you didn't even disagree with it.)
People forget that Computer Scientists has actual foundations built upon objective, scientifically backed, work in multiple disciplines, including mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.
We use those foundations to build the tools that we then use to engineer software. It is one of the few fields where practitioners are expected to know both the foundational theories underpinning the tools they build, as well as then use those tools to create absurdly complex projects.
Sadly some people skip over the theory part.