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Interesting. It reminds me of how (simple) compression schemes save disk space and speed throughput on modern database systems. Moving data around the memory hi
by vegabook 11y ago
Interesting. It reminds me of how (simple) compression schemes save disk space and speed throughput on modern database systems. Moving data around the memory hierarchy is the bottleneck in all systems it seems, from registers, via cache, RAM, (soon x-point,) SSDs, all the way to spinning disks and indeed offsite storage. Some form of space optimisation seems to pay off both ways across this hierarchy even if it is more compute intensive. It was not always so: in the 90s and earlier, compression tended to have had a speed tradeoff.
- joosters 11y agoI agree, compression becoming 'free' or 'better than free' is counter-intuitive and yet it can be a performance improvement. Perhaps we may see another change in priorities in the future though, as systems optimise more and more for power consumption over raw speed... (There are SSDs that do transparent compression/decompression. I wonder if there are RAM chips out there that do the same thing for performance?) To be fair to ARM, their original decision to stick to fixed size instructions was probably correct at the time, when the limiting factor in performance was entirely CPU, and memory speeds were not so much a bottleneck.