Hacker News Reader

I have a similar memory, there's something entrancing about watching a computer do a computationally (in space or time) difficult task with a visualisation about what exactly is actually happening. For defrag it was mostly a progress bar, but still it was fascinating to young me

View on HN

I kind of think of computer microarchitecure as a factory, as in factorio (Which I admit I have not played, because I've been warned against it)

There's instruction stream streams into L3, L2, L1 caches from DRAM, PCIE, DMA

then there's multiple cores and they each have register files, they shuffle numbers between registers and the caches.

There's reordering going on, there's parallelisation going on, lots of conveyor belts.

It's all so complicated factory.

Absolutely, just the results of the factory are not physical. You can apply this analogy quite far inside software development, engineers are factories producing data for a compute factory to further process etc. Also I'll echo warnings about factorio, you will lose days. But so very worth it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com