kens

54 ms·

781.
by kens 3y ago
The accounting scandal was the proximate cause, but I think the underlying issue was Moore's Law. I've examined the performance of Datapoint's TTL-based computers vs microprocessors. In 1972, the 2200 V2 was over 6 times as f
782.
by kens 3y ago
To be superscalar, a processor must initiate multiple instructions per clock cycle. Having multiple functional units isn't sufficient to be superscalar if one instruction is dispatched at a time. You get higher performance from the mul
783.
by kens 3y ago
Octal is nice with a 12-bit machine but octal is absolutely awful when using bytes on a 16-bit machine. The problem is that the two bytes are encoded differently in octal. For example, the string "AB" is 4142 in hex while "BA
784.
by kens 3y ago
There was some discussion of APX on HN a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36853166#
785.
by kens 3y ago
That digit order is an interesting choice to bring out more structure. The downside is the registers and RST instructions get weirdly permuted. (By the way, your link is broken because the closing parenthesis gets appended; I recommend a sp
786.
by kens 3y ago
The Datapoint 3300 was strictly a terminal. It was not programmable and did not have an instruction set. It basically had counters for the cursor position and put characters into memory at that position, and had a ROM to generate characters
787.
by kens 3y ago
Thanks, I've fixed that.
788.
by kens 3y ago
As Intel engineer Tom Forsyth said, "The REAL cost of x86 legacy is not gates, it’s lots and lots of meetings."
789.
by kens 3y ago
Thanks, that's very interesting and I've updated the footnote. I looked at the CDC 6600 manual and it works pretty much like you say. If you change an address register A1-A5, the system automatically reads from memory into the cor
790.
by kens 3y ago
Author here if you have questions about the Datapoint 2200 :-)
791.
by kens 3y ago
2006 is too modern for me since the features are very small. I usually reverse engineer chips from the 1970s.
792.
by kens 3y ago
Multiple layers of metal and a 2006 date make reverse engineering this die more of a challenge then I want.
793.
by kens 3y ago
The computation uses the 50 states (or 48 conterminous states for calculations made prior to 1960) and the District of Columbia. Source: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2010/prog...
794.
by kens 3y ago
There is a lot of speculation here on what this means, so I looked it up. The median center is the point through which a north-south and an east-west line each divides the total population of the country in half. This is different from the
795.
Mozilla finds CPU bug (bad store forwarding) in Samsung Galaxy S20(bugzilla.mozilla.org)
246 points by kens 3y ago|74 comments
796.
by kens 3y ago
Am I the only person who thinks that this sort of telemetry is a good thing? It helps the user if telemetry provides reports of bugs and performance issues that help improve the product. It is a benefit to me that if a program keeps crashin
797.
by kens 3y ago
No, the Motorola 6820 simply provides two I/O ports. The Intel 8089 is a complete processor with its own instruction set, acting as an intelligent DMA controller. So you can run complex programs on the 8089 to process the I/O data
798.
by kens 3y ago
Typical probes are rated for 600 volts (CAT III), so you'd have insulation rated for 600 volts between your fingers and 30,000 volts, which is kind of hazardous. Here's a recent Twitter video showing what happens when you combine
799.
by kens 3y ago
After seeing two cargo-cult articles on the HN front page today, I have to say that "cargo cult" has become a meaningless cliche that people use to describe anything that's wrong.
800.
by kens 3y ago
Yes, Intel had pointless restraints on pin counts; the 8008 processor was barely allowed 18 pins. So the 8080 designers were lucky that they got all the way to 40 pins. Federico Faggin has ranted about this in a few places. As far as applic
801.
by kens 3y ago
Wow, I was surprised to see my article from 2013 appear on HN today! (It's hard to believe that the article is 10 years old.) In that time, the x86 documentation has expanded from four volumes to 10 volumes. Curiously, the number of pa
802.
by kens 3y ago
Do you have any reason at all to think they damaged the transmitter?
803.
by kens 3y ago
Yes, it's a joke. It's not complete nonsense, though, unlike the Turboencabulator. There's a real explanation buried inside there. ("Where it isn't" is the target position, so it's looking at the deviation
804.
by kens 3y ago
ARM has a lot more market share in people's minds than in actual numbers. One research firm says that ARM has 15% of the laptop market share in 2023, expected to increase to 25% by 2027. (Surprisingly, Apple only has 90% of the ARM lap
805.
by kens 3y ago
There is U+2422 Blank Symbol (␢).
806.
by kens 3y ago
It's interesting to examine this website with the thousands of trademarks for "X". Some are extremely stylized while others are just the letter X. Some are specific to particular colors. Some cover very narrow areas. Microsof
807.
by kens 3y ago
I've done a ton of research on this, and "main frame" in the computer sense originated with the IBM 701, which was built from various frames such as the power frame, the storage frame, and the main frame (which performed comp
808.
by kens 3y ago
They ask for the worksheet to check that you're not cheating. They don't check the pixel values. I think much of the charm of the image is seeing the errors. By the way, there's more going on in the shader algorithm than you
809.
by kens 3y ago
Yes, I find it interesting to note the different types of errors. There are some random errors, but many of the errors seem to be repeated. It looks like a lot of people ended up in the wrong code path, resulting in blue/white pixels i
810.
Human Shader(humanshader.com)
50 points by kens 3y ago|1 comments

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