4 ms·
I have known from the transistor level through to the mouse moving on the screen, just not all at once. If I put the effort in then I know I could have a solid
by MaximumYComb 6y ago
I have known from the transistor level through to the mouse moving on the screen, just not all at once. If I put the effort in then I know I could have a solid grasp of all stages at once but it would be a waste. If you're programming in assembly then you're dealing with instruction sets. You don't need to know how transistors make up a NAND gate to program with instructions, or even how gates fit together to make higher order components. You just need to need you have a processor and memory.
- Joeri 6y agoTo write highest performance assembly code you need to understand more than the instruction set. You need to understand about cache hierarchy and how cache lines are filled, about microcode and how to fill the pipeline, including how to exploit hyperthreads, what the consequence of different workloads is on boost speeds, how the vectorized instructions map to hardware and when the trade-off is worth it, etc... Not to mention that you really also need to be a GPGPU expert so you can trade off work to the graphics hardware when necessary. One can write assembly while knowing only a fraction of that stuff, but the compiler will probably outperform that kind of assembly, so there is little point aside from the fun of it.