Ten lies about microprocessors | Hacker News Reader

Ten lies about microprocessors

embedded.com

21 pointsmixmax9 comments

Garbage collection, threads, stack orientation, and object management take about a megabyte worth of Java virtual machine to translate into something that even today's fastest microprocessors struggle to execute.

"Struggle to execute"? Is that why JVM languages are some of the fastest languages out there? 1996 called, it wants its FUD about the JVM back.

Edit: Nevermind. The article is from 2003. (2003 called. It wants its article back.)

I think what the guy means is that if you tried to implement garbage collection, threading and object management using registers, flip flops and PROM, you'll end up with such large circuits that your chip would become way slower, not to speak of being extremely complex.

Byte code is not assembler like ASM, it has some pretty high level functions in there that are quite difficult to implement on a very low level.

> Compared to the big 68030, 29000, and 486DX chips of the day, the wee ARM6 consumed less total energy than the others gave off as heat

wtf? All energy 'consumed' by a processor is given off as heat. Such incorrect hyperbole makes me doubt the entire article.

that can't be all true - isn't some of it as radiated energy in RF spectrum?

He wasn't saying that the only energy given off was that or heat or that all energy put in was given off as heat he said, you could run the arm processor on the portion of energy given off as heat.

Processors transition around 95%+ of their energy to heat so it's not a significant statement. (A little is used to communicate with RAM etc.)

touche sir. (although that doesn't really affect my point)

So you're claiming that processors behave exactly the same way as resistors?

It's not true that a processor conversts ALL of the energy it consumes as heat, because things like transistor flip-flops consume energy in addition to producing waste in the form of heat.

Their use to waste ratio might be low, but it's not zero as you implied.

Yes, with regards to energy conversion - electricity in, heat out. In a processor, the energy _is_ used to perform computation, but it is not "consumed" but converted to heat.

(The phrase 'consume energy' actually only makes sense if you're talking about nuclear reactions)

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