Modern Microprocessors – A 90 Minute Guide | Hacker News Reader

Modern Microprocessors – A 90 Minute Guide

lighterra.com

170 pointsTomte12 comments

Previous discussions of this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7174513 (743 days ago, 226 points, 37 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2428403 (1774 days ago, 283 points, 30 comments)

People should note however, this appears to have been updated since the last posting - there are references to things that have happened since 743 days ago (e.g. "Today (early 2015)") and discussions of Haswell.

Frequent thing I see here on HN and many other sites is the immediate dismissal of VLIW... This sort of archtiecture has had a bad rap since it was first talked about (over 30 years ago now), to the present day. This is really encouraging me to write a post on why VLIWs have been unjustly shit on, and why what most people think of VLIWs (E.g. Itanium) is not a true VLIW.

At least the linked article gives a mostly fair (but very brief) description of VLIW, but then inappropriately compares it to Intel/HP's EPIC, which while inspired by VLIW, went so far off the rails, which in my opinion, led it to be a failed architecture.

Well, that and what it says in your profile should make for a popular topic.

(Although demanding audiences want 'two orders of magnitude', perhaps 25x can squeak by ;-)

Ok. Just link to examples where it works vs modern processors while avoiding failures of Itanium etc. Outside of embedded space or constraints: HPC or at least desktop-grade stuff. That should either strongly support your claim or settle the debate depending on quality of evidence.

I'm actually going to commit to writing this over the weekend... I'll post it on HN, aiming for Monday.

Please do, I would love to hear a piece with a pro-VLIW perspective.

I always found Transmeta's approach to VLIW very interesting. In a way, it did for VLIW what current GPUs are doing for SIMD: take the dispatching away from the compiler and use the more rich runtime information to fill in the slots.

On a side-note, how does Rex's architecture compare to other VLIW tiled mesh-based architectures from before (e.g. Tilera)?

Given the self-imposed limitation of being a "90 Minute Guide", this is great stuff. Very readable, even entertaining (at least to me), without giving me the impression of being talked down to.

> by Jason Robert Carey Patterson

Is the author related to David Patterson?

(Known from [1])

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Fifth-Quantitati...

I don't think so, Jason Robert Carey Patterson is from Australia.

Can anyone recommend a really basic intro to microprocessors? For someone who hasn't done a CS degree or studied hardware at all. This article seems very readable, but I feel like I'm missing the basics.

This is the basic intro to current used cpu's and I must say this is the best short description of how a cpu works. Determine what you want to do and try to tweak it to your performance level and learn on the way. Don't forget checking your motherboard manual and tuning your extra devices to it.

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