>Most programmers have an intimate understanding of CPUs
maybe this article is brilliant, but when the first line is something so blatantly untrue it really makes it hard to take the rest seriously
maybe this article is brilliant, but when the first line is something so blatantly untrue it really makes it hard to take the rest seriously
Took some philosophy courses for fun in college. I developed a reading skill there that lets me forgive certain statements by improving them instead of dismissing them. My brain now automatically translates over-generalizations and even outright falsehoods into rationally-nearby true statements. As the argument unfolds, those ideas are reconfigured until the entire piece can be evaluated as logically coherent.
The upshot is that any time I read a crappy article, I'm left with a new batch of true and false premises or claims about topics I'm interested in. And thus my mental world expands.
I tried real hard to understand what some continental philosophers, such as Latour, Deleuze, and Žižek are on about, giving some of their texts quite some benefit of the doubt. After about ten years of doing so, I am more and more returning to my previous opinion that some of these just like to talk, and even though they have lots to say, they say so much, that I still have to do all the actual philosophizing myself.
To that end, you have to approach philosophical reading with a degree of hypothetical detachment that not everyone is immediately comfortable with.
The "chats" are usually edifying, but I am often frustrated by the rambling and repetition (He is always trying to bring in new listeners, so that partly explains the repetition)
But from my own (arm chair politcal organizer) point of view, i'm thinking "you have ~10 very good key points you touch on/repeat over time, why not be a more effective communicator, make this visual as well as verbal and turn this into a message. I.e. bullet points that are always close at hand and that you're l using to tie the talk together."
But that's basically propaganda main tool.
So thanks for sharing your effort and discipline in going to the philosophy classes. Your more expansive approach to what people aay chimes very much with my yT mentor's reminder to listen 99% and judge 1%.
Dont try to win every argument or prove your point of view is right. Others are entitled to their (wrong (-; ) opinions (just as if we think back to our changing points of view, we have been "wrong" in the past too. Judge yee not ....)
By continuing to listen to those we don't agree with we are putting a face to ideas they dont accept or understand (it is easier to stay in your own bubble when you are only looking/hearing people that you agree with) AND by listening respectfully we are keeping the lines of communication open.
I did an undergrad in CS, where I did well. I don't feel like I understand CPUs very well. Certainly not anywhere in the realm of "intimate."
If your day to day involves "intimate knowledge with the CPU" and bumping program counters, I can rule out a lot of things that you probably aren't building, like a compelling iOS app or forum HTTP server, for example.
Maybe you're doing impressive work on emulators or something though. But it's nothing to get pompous about just because other people don't share that interest.
We too easily go off careening into a circlejerk.
and 101 other hilarious jokes you can tell yourself!"
In my school to pass the computer architecture course you had to read and present a recent paper on CPU design.
I'm very confident in people having the ability to read by the time they are in college. And considering that summarizing a research paper doesn't even have to be perfect, plus very little need to scrutinize the experiment itself, undergrads should be able to do that.
Otherwise they don't belong in college.
Please tell me you forgot the /s.
I have a PhD in computer engineering from a top-20 school in US. Took a bunch of grad level classes, passed the quals (my specialty was ML accelerators).
I do NOT have an “intimate understanding of CPUs”. I probably know a little bit more about CPUs than an average programmer. Which is very little.
Modern CPUs are extremely complex. Almost as much of impenetrable black boxes as modern neural networks.
I think the descriptor “intimate” is overstating the case if you don’t know how to optimize code on different implementations of the same ISA. Most formal CS programs give you a generic understanding of CPUs, more like a survey course, not enough information to do serious optimization.
Compilers are good at finding very local optimizations targeting specific microarchitectures. If you use godbolt and switch out the architecture flags you can see how the codegen changes.
However, as with higher level code, the compiler can’t rewrite your data structures or see patterns spread across too much code. As a simple example, modern cores have 4+ concurrent ALUs with different capabilities. Some of those ALUs are usually idle if there are not enough independent instructions or independent instructions are too far away from the current instruction. You can see large performance improvements simply by reorganizing your C code so that the compiler and CPU can see more opportunities to use more ALUs in parallel. Interestingly, a lot of these code changes are trivial no-ops at the code semantics level, but they bring the ALU concurrency opportunity within view of the CPU.
There is an active niche community on the Internet that studies how various instruction sequences interact with various microarchitectures. This is probably the best resource because a lot of detail is not well documented by the CPU companies themselves. It requires a fair amount of experimentation to develop an intuition for how code will run on a given CPU at this level of detail.
Could elaborate on that? I mean where do I find this community?
It could have been worded more constructively sure, but given that the entire point of this website is to have discussions about the material posted, I think it’s added quite a bit.
I learned basic facts about CPU architectures at university, know in a very basic way the landscape of things and occasionaly stumble upon updates to my limited knowledge... but by no means would I say that, rather like "a basic understanding of how CPUs work / are designed / are to be used" (?)
If I were proficient in assembler, maybe I'd claim to have an "intimate understanding" of how to use CPUs at a low level (still sounds a bit braggy)
It still is not the same though as being an expert in CPU/GPU design.
So yeah I agree.
Article is interesting though, esp. the diagram!
However, given the prevalence of the von Neumann computing architecture, I don't think it's completely off the mark - even if people don't know von Neumann's name :)