A Crash Course in Modern Hardware | Hacker News Reader

A Crash Course in Modern Hardware

azulsystems.com

75 pointsfogus9 comments

A keeper, if nothing else (and there's much more) for the ultra-clear chart of three stages of CPU performance, 1978-2006, on page 4.

The Azul Systems site mentions their own 54-core CPU ( http://www.azulsystems.com/technology/vega ), but there does not seem to be much publicly available about the architecture. I was wondering if it was a Sparc derivative (the PDF also mentions Sun's Niagara for Chip Multi Threading). They had a legal tiff with Sun in 2005-2007 ...

Couple of links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azul_Systems , http://www.taranfx.com/boost-java-performance-5x-times-hardw...

P.S. Coincidentally, one of the presentation's references for further reading is the 2007 monograph by Ulrich Drepper also gracing the frontpage of HN today at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1394346

This tech talk is an in depth look at their CPU design process http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uljtqyBLxI

Thanks. I just found out there's a text abstract one can click to expand ... Snippets:

[...] The cores are our own design; simple 3-address RISCs with read- & write-barriers to support GC, hardware transactional memory, zero-cost high-rez profiling, and some more modest Java-specific tweaks. [...] history with designing our own chips (1st silicon back from the fab had problems like the bits in the odd-numbered registers bleeding into the even-numbered registers)[...]

Very good presentation on performance and computer architecture with today's technical limitations.

With the added feature of Azul making some of the coolest server hardware I ever seen.

Considering the total lack of low-end models and the fact that you can't rent it, Azul may be the coolest hardware most people have never seen. Or is that Tilera...

I'd never heard of them, but it does seem that they're aiming for a niche directly opposite to my usual experience.

Seems like they make some awesome stuff though!

> may be the coolest hardware most people have never seen

That's unfair. They made a couple good videos.

The idea in the presentation that reinforced my own bias: RAM is the new disk. However, the details they presented make it look worse than I imagined, as memory / FSB speeds are apparently grossly overstated.

Now, toss in VMs like Java and .NET walking the heap looking for garbage to take out. Sounds like a cache-miss disaster, to me.

My opinion: http://roboprogs.com/devel/2009.07.html#2009_07_30

well, anything without a vm would be preferred for performance optimization on the hardware, much like anything without needing to be compiled gives one the most control. overall i think you are studying the right things. for me lately, vm's have been okay. the jit compiler is impressive, and llvm & pypy are interesting things too

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