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It's disappointing that most machines today suck so badly. How did that become the state of the industry, with so many smart people working so hard and nobody l
by tlb 7y ago
It's disappointing that most machines today suck so badly. How did that become the state of the industry, with so many smart people working so hard and nobody likes their latest designs?
The last high-performance design I actually liked was the DEC Alpha. You could write a useful JIT compiler in a couple hundred lines.
I suspect that nVidia's recent GPUs are wonderfully clever inside, but they don't publish their ISA and the drivers are super-clunky. So I can't admire them.
I appreciate the performance of intel Core chips, but there's so much to dislike. The ISA is literally too big to fully document. The kernel needs 1000s of workarounds for CPU weirdnesses. You have to apply security patches to microcode, FFS.
RISC-V would be great if we had fast servers and laptops.
- oddity 7y ago> How did that become the state of the industry, with so many smart people working so hard and nobody likes their latest designs? The average consumer doesn't buy a fantastically well designed CPU if it doesn't run the software they care about. x86, externally, is horrifically ugly primarily because of backwards compatibility (I've legitimately had a nightmare once from writing an x86 JIT compiler). Internally, I'm almost certain it's an incredible feat of engineering. People who admire architecture aren't a powerful market force, I'm sad to say.
- kjs3 7y agoWhat's wrong with Power 8 & 9? What's wrong with ARM64? What was wrong with Sparc64 until Oracle screwed it up (well...register windows...ok). How is RISC-V intrinsically better than those architectures, considering it doesn't exist in a form that performs anywhere near as fast?
- agumonkey 7y agoMass market doesn't value admiration