brucehoult

8 ms·

61.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
It depends on what you call "high performance". I have in my hands one of the new SpacemiT K3 machines. It arrived today. I'm comparing it to several other things, and finding that it is pretty comparable to a "late 2012
62.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
If you want to get the absolute most out of a specific CPU that is in your hands then you of course have to refer to the documentation for that specific CPU. That process doesn't depend on whether it's an x86 or an Arm or a RISC-V
63.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
I have a machine in my hot little hands. It arrived today. https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/2056911834737975635/photo/1 I've already posted on github my first project written on and for it today: ht
64.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
The average bystander doesn't have to care, just buy a machine implementing the RVA23 profile (standard set of extensions) and be happy. If you're building your own embedded hardware then you determine what your needs actually are
65.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
AVR is vastly better to program than 8 bit PIC — either by hand or by compiler from C — but some people still insist on using those PICs for simple things. The "PIC32" name was originally used for MIPS CPUs but more recently ARM o
66.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
I'm not sure why anyone would care what chip is in a router that should just sit there doing its job and you're not going to write or run other software on? Sure it's kind of nice to know the car media player thing I've
67.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
> it’s not even clear if it can saturate a gigabit If that's the case then it's not the CPU's fault. I can't open the linked site but assuming it's really the same as a BPI-F3 i.e. a SpacemiT K1 chip, that can do
68.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
The size of a register is not the largest value you can conveniently count on a computer. You can use multiple registers. Old computers often had a "carry flag" specifically to make this easier e.g.on Arm: add r0,r0,#1 a
69.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
That 10c microcontroller has 15 32 bit registers, allowing you to make up to a 480 bit counter. That ought to be enough until long after the heat death of the universe. It also has 2k (16384 bits) of SRAM, allowing even larger counters. It
70.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
Trivial with a 10c microcontroller ...
71.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
I find it much easier to write a ten line program for an 8 pin CH32V003 (or ATTiny85 in past times) to do exactly the timing or SDC comparisons I want than to figure out the circuit and component values for a 555 or op-amp. For that matter,
72.
by brucehoult 5mo ago
Not THAT much of watershed. I didn't even see a lot of stuff about the equivalent first ARMv9 SBCs (and first with SVE almost TEN YEARS after the spec was published), the Radxa Orion O6 a year ago and Orange Pi 6 Plus half a year ago (
73.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
My example is applicable to compiler / assembler / JIT / emulator. The performance of conventional compilers and assemblers is not important to anyone but developers, but everyone uses JavaScript / WebAsm all the time. A
74.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
Both the PowerPC and Arm64 instructions do grab a lot of encoding space. rlwimi uses 26 bits of opcode space (i.e. 2^26 = 64M code points). In a RISC-V context you can drop the Rc (set status flags) bit, but for RV64 you need to expand the
75.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
> rlwimi / rlwinm Definitely a nice and pretty much pioneering feature on PowerPC in 1994 (and I guess RS/6000 before that, but I never used one). Today's Arm64 BFM does both those jobs in one, minus the ability to create
76.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
Compared to Delhi? Ok. But I've had a soaking uncomfortable shirt every time I've been to Vegas, while in Phoenix it evaporates quickly.
77.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
I was also on BIX, then NLZ, same name as here. Even made it into the "Best of BIX" in the back of BYTE a couple of times. Living in New Zealand, it wasn't easy to meet people — or for that matter to access BIX! I was fortuna
78.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
Interesting (but understandable pre-silicon) to see a couple of errors about the 6502 in that e.g. SBC needs SEC before it not CLC. The code examples could be improved too e.g. the 6502 memory copy has no need to use both index registers an
79.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
It became just another MS-DOS rag. In the early days it covered EVERYTHING, all ISAs, all programming languages (very famous Lips and Forth and Smalltalk issues, for example). See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478294
80.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
> CP/M did have a sort of revival in that it became common in low-end machines like the C-128 Amstrad were good late 80s CP/M machines. We got both those and C128 in New Zealand. > the one RISC/CISC CPU thing that reall
81.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
Yeah, I've got a complete collection from October 1978 to December 1991 (by which time they had became just another x86 PC rag). I bought a fair few individual copies myself from 78 or 79 until the late 80s, but the bulk of my collecti
82.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
Definitely not true. I've been using Boehm GC with my C/C++ programs for decades — since the 90s, at least.
83.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
> built by one single dad Not some random dad, but a GC expert and former leader of the JavaScript VM team at Apple.
84.
RV32I Reference [pdf](hoult.org)
6 points by brucehoult 6mo ago|1 comments
85.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
I cut down the December 2019 RISC-V ISA manual to just the things needed to get started with RV32I, to be even less intimidating. I left out the end of the RV32I chapter with fence, ecall/ebreak, and hints. But included the later page
86.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
I've been a gliding instructor, sometimes doing up to ten flights a day, all summer (e.g. when I was unemployed for a time). In the NZ/Aus/UK style clubs you don't get paid for it, but then it doesn't cost you anyth
87.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
Correct. Your point being? Digital logic didn't change.
88.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
Not all flight hours are equal. Airline pilots rack up a lot of hours but get very little "stick time", and what they do get is extremely sedate flying to not scare the passengers / spill their drinks. Their primary skills ar
89.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
The Cray 1 was built 100% from NOR gates and SRAM.
90.
by brucehoult 6mo ago
It didn't look to me like everyone else was hiring at the start of COVID. That's one reason I left the country after only 11 months of my H-1B visa. > we're going to make it very easy for people to produce application spec

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