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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

I got tired of the video because they never got to the point. Here’s the article:

https://hackaday.com/2024/03/21/why-x86-needs-to-die/

The article is, uh, well it’s bad. I’m a little hesitant to respond point-by-point to an article like this because it just sucks up so much time, and there’s just so much wrong with the article on so many levels. Here’s the response article:

https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/03/27/why-x86-doesnt-need-to...

The video appears to go into detail about things like how pipelines but it’s a long video that just doesn’t get to the point fast enough. I think the video is somewhat tearing into the article and ripping it apart, but I hear some comments in the video which I think are not that great, like at 1:01:25:

> RISC is reduced instruction set computer, just means not very many instructions

RISC is better understood not in terms of the acronym itself, but as a label for the way CPUs were designed post 1980 or so.

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What really needs to die here isn't x86, it's the entire concept of RISC versus CISC.

RISC is a collection of ideas about how to build chips that came about in the late 70s and early 80s. CISC is a retronym for things that didn't have those ideas. Some ideas worked out. Some ideas have failed. It's no longer a useful concept for talking about computer architecture; let's instead talk about the actual microarchitecture of the chips.

(Also, yowsers, that original article really is bad.)

Yeah, I completely agree. RISC vs CISC needs to be buried.

It’s interesting to hear stories from the actual designers of CISC chips, because they talk about the things that they did to try and make their chips faster and more useful. “Lots of addressing modes” is one of them, and it kinda turns out the future is to have fewer addressing modes.

And the reasoning for it is kinda interesting. Like, imagine that you have a memory indirect addressing mode, and decide to throw an increment on there for good measure. That’s cool and all, but most compilers never figured out how to generate those instructions, and you can get two page faults from a single damn instruction. Kinda makes it hard to deal with exceptions correctly.

There are also a few bad ideas that came out of the natural evolution of RISC doctrines. Non-interlocked instructions and hazards, VLIW for general-purpose CPUs, a few others. I think in general, if you expose too little of the details of how your CPU works you sabotage anyone trying to write fast code, and if you expose too much of the details, you sabotage your ability to ship a new CPU that works differently.

RISC more accurately stands for "load-store architecture", which is very odd because RISC has four letters and there are only three words in load-store architecture.

It seems there's a cult following of pseudo-intellectuals/dev celebrities who all seem to have only worked at "faang" like companies. Everything about it is a bit weird.

In this case, the one named like prime number, seems to spend extraordinary amounts of time waffling on about nothing in particular on twitch streams with a relentless torrent of energy, and then this feeds the echo chamber of their fans.

Nothing of substance is touched on more than briefly. I am not really sure what the point was of this whole article and guest appearance.

Primagen is like the textbook definition of a brogrammer. He's not an idiot but I suspect there was more to him getting hired at FAANG than aside from just his technical ability.

He knows how to work with audience. The twitch persona does what twitch persona does. The non-twitch educational dev content is quite different and good quality - his htmx intro is great for example. There are areas he knows how to play well.

I wouldn't try to infer much about the real person from the content.

> I suspect there was more to him getting hired at FAANG than aside from just his technical ability

Any evidence? He was at Netflix for practically a decade, and Netflix is known for letting go underperformers very quickly.

TLDR but I'm responding to let you know that I'm grumpy, got that? I am grumpy, carry on.

Yes, I didn’t watch the entire hour-long video recorded from a live stream.

This is not a tight, edited, informational video. It’s not even a scripted presentation. It’s two guys reading an article and reacting to it. They spend some time talking about Three-Body Problem, and Twitch streaming.

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