phire

17 ms·

241.
by phire 1y ago
> Instructions are more easily added than taken away. That's not saying much, it's basically impossible to remove an instruction. Just because something is easier than impossible doesn't mean that it's easy. And sur
242.
by phire 1y ago
Multiuser machines could get away with surprisingly little memory; They had some major advantages over home computers: Users were all connected via CRT terminals over serial, so you didn't need to waste any memory on screen buffers. Th
243.
by phire 1y ago
AMD named their memory fabric "infinity fabric" for marketing reasons. So when they developed their memory attached cache solution (which lives in the memory fabric, unlike a traditional cache), the obvious marketing name is &quot
244.
by phire 1y ago
The manufacturer didn’t even know encryption was enabled, because as long as the camera was working, it would just provide all files over USB without any encryption. It was basically enabled by accident, and the only thing it prevented was
245.
by phire 1y ago
Phone cameras fake it. They don't capture a light field like Lytro did, they capture a regular image with a very deep depth of field, extract a depth map (usually with machine learning, but some phones augment it with stereoscopy or ev
246.
by phire 1y ago
IBM selling off their PC/laptop arm? Intel exiting the memory business? AMD spinning off their Fabs? Commodore scraping their calculator line?
247.
by phire 1y ago
Acid 2 bakes in the assumption that you will be displaying it on a desktop/laptop monitor with 100% scaling; It depends on pixel accuracy. This was a reasonably universal assumption in 2005, but became less and less valid over time, we
248.
by phire 1y ago
> A Haskell analysis showed that integer workloads (the most common in normal computing) saw some 4.8w out of 22.1w dedicated to the decoder. You are mixing studies, the Haskell paper only looked at total core paper (and checked how it w
249.
by phire 1y ago
That AMD slide (in the conclusion) claims their switching fabric has some kind of bypass mode to improve latency when utilisation is low. So they have been really optimising that IO die for latency. NUMA is already workload sensitive, you n
250.
by phire 1y ago
This is what ARM's Thumb-2 has with its various If-Then-Else instructions. One instruction can skip upto four subsequent instructions if the condition fails. It can also do else clauses, instructions that get executed only when the con
251.
by phire 1y ago
And that design is generally regarded to have been a mistake, results in very bad code density. ARM went out of their way to remove it. Multiple times, with both AArch64 and the various implementations of Thumb.
252.
by phire 1y ago
The main argument against using CMOV on OoO cores is that it creates data dependencies. The backend can't start executing downstream dependant μops until after the cmov executes. At a first glance, it might seem insane to replace a sim
253.
by phire 1y ago
> but about instruction fusion in general in any ISA with a memory model at least as strong as RVWMO -- which includes x86 No... It's kind of an artefact of RISC-V's memory model being weak. x86 side-steps the issue because i
254.
by phire 1y ago
In my experience, btrfs just doesn't seem to be very resilient to hardware faults. Everything works great as long as you stay on the golden path, but when you fall off that path, it gets into a confused state and things start going ver
255.
by phire 1y ago
They are using VoIP hardware, but it's not actually VoIP (which would be limited to 33kbps, they are connecting at 44kbps). The 56k modem standard actually abuses the T1 digital voice signalling that telephone exchanges were using in t
256.
by phire 1y ago
You are thinking of the 777 ER, which holds more kerosene than the first stage of Falcon 9 (and slightly less fuel than both stages combined) The 737 is a much smaller plane, and its fuel capacity is near the ballpark of 10x smaller.
257.
by phire 1y ago
To be clear, I'm not expecting btrfs (or any filesystem) to avoid corrupt itself on unreliable hardware. I'm not expecting it to magically avoid unavoidable data loss. All I want is an fsck that I can trust. I love that btrfs will
258.
by phire 1y ago
To be clear, when I (and most people) say OoO, I don't mean just the act of executing instructions out-of-order. I mean the whole modern paradigm of "complex branch predictors, controlling wide front-ends, feeding schedulers with
259.
by phire 1y ago
> Bob Colwell mentions originally doing out of order design at Multiflow. Actually no, it was Metaflow [0] who was doing out-of-order. To quote Colwell: "I think he lacked faith that the three of us could pull this off. So he con
260.
by phire 1y ago
While Linux helped, I'd argue the true factor is that x86 failed to die as projected. The common attitude in the 80s and 90s was that legacy ISAs like 68k and x86 had no future. They had zero chance to keep up with the innovation of mo
261.
by phire 1y ago
> Corrupt my drive twice, can't corrupt my drive again. Exact same drive? You might want to check that drive isn't silently corrupting data. I still blame btrfs, something very similar happened to me. I had a WD Green drive w
262.
by phire 1y ago
I'm pretty sure they actually use their data-mining advantage to make their betting offers as attractive to regular users as possible, and therefore maximise profit. It's so easy to just ban any user who gets "too lucky"
263.
by phire 1y ago
For marketing reasons, it needs to be something that people can pick up with absolutely minimal practice. I doubt it has enough accuracy for a virtual keyboards (since keyboards require precise absolute input and it measures relative), besi
264.
by phire 1y ago
A law would be better, otherwise companies will start with low prices and data export functionality when attracting customers, then quietly remove it right when they switch to extracting maximum value. Even a daily export won't save yo
265.
by phire 1y ago
Because CPUs still have instructions that automatically truncate the result of all math operations to 32 bits (and sometimes 8-bit and 16-bit too, though not universally). To operate on any other size, you need to insert extra instructions
266.
by phire 1y ago
I don’t think Ukraine would have risked an operation against a country they were actively trying to get military support from. My money is actually on Polish special forces (or one of the Baltic states), in an effort to force Germany to be
267.
by phire 1y ago
Watson was given the whole prompt (as text) right when Trebek started reading it out aloud, so it had a full 6-7 seconds to choose an answer. ChatGPT is more than fast enough to get an answer under the same constraints.
268.
by phire 1y ago
Nuclear power has a massive handicap that most R&D was abandoned back in the 80s because it was uneconomic. And another handicap that the R&D it did get was never that focused on economics, commercial nuclear power were always a sid
269.
by phire 1y ago
If the goal is 100% carbon-free energy, then we simply can't let economics get in the way. Otherwise we will always be stuck building some natural gas peaker plants. And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices do
270.
by phire 1y ago
That's high precision clocks (aka Preformance.now(), with sub-millisecond resolution) not timers. The precision of setTimeout has never been high, it kind-of maps to the OS scheduler and the OS scheduler often enforce their own minimum

More ›