4 ms·
The most annoying thing about esoteric wiki articles is missing context. Most of them explain the thing but not HOW or WHY it matters or why it is important.
by throayobviousl 5y ago
The most annoying thing about esoteric wiki articles is missing context. Most of them explain the thing but not HOW or WHY it matters or why it is important.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoDid you happen to notice how almost every other word in the summary is blue?
- timsneath 5y agoI'm sure they did (a gentle reminder that we try and avoid snark on HN -- see the guidelines). This post intrigues me and piques my curiosity -- it's an interesting fork of the Intel x86 family tree that obviously didn't go anywhere. But the context for the submission is also interesting: does it relate to some emulator work that the submitter is doing, for example? Or is there a potential vulnerability that could be exposed by the existence of these instructions? Or was it purely the discovery of this learning that caused them to want to share it? HN doesn't provide an automatic means to share that context with a link submission, which is a pity. But I for one would love to hear more from the poster.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoI think I misunderstood the comment. I was thinking about the article and not about the HN submission of the article. And to that, I also wonder why many posts were posted when they don't come with any comment.
- don-code 5y agoThere doesn't seem to be any context on whether this was an intentional feature, intended to be used by userspace programs, or something entirely undocumented that wasn't intended to see widespread use. What's more, it doesn't dive into why it matters - if the microarchitecture's the same, isn't the only benefit a shorter pipeline; maybe you can skip some of the complex CISC->RISC decoding? Itanium seems to have, in any case, shown us that exposing the microarchitecture for the sake of performance is an antipattern.