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I highly recommend the Stanford EE380 video "Things CPU Architects Need To Think About". Even though it is from 2004, much of the material is still relevant. B
by rogerbinns 13y ago
I highly recommend the Stanford EE380 video "Things CPU Architects Need To Think About". Even though it is from 2004, much of the material is still relevant. Bob Colwell notes that they had similar unexpected throughput slowdowns when implementing the P6 and Netburst processor cores, and discovered that adding random delays cleared them out. The cause for throughput hiccups could be traced back, sometimes hundreds or thousands of instructions, but were extremely difficult to address. They also found that manufacturing assembly lines had similar problems that were also addresses by adding delay.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ay0304.html http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ay0304.html (18 Feb 2004, site appears to be having issues at the moment)
- zwegner 13y agoThanks for the link! Looks interesting. Here's an alternative link, that actually works: http://lang.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/2003-2004/040218-ee380-100.wmv http://lang.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/2003-2004/040218-ee38...
- acqq 13y agoIt's such a good talk. There's even the point where he almost says "we're sorry" regarding Pentium 4, at the time where a lot of people still believed Intel's marketing that it's "the best." I understood him, as the application I worked on at the time was significantly faster on the Pentium M than on the Pentium 4.
- rogerbinns 13y agoI also love the bit about the floating point divide non-optimisation, and how it turned into a success.