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ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, and David A. Patterson, retired Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, recipients of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry. Hennessy and Patterson created a systematic and quantitative approach to designing faster, lower power, and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessors. Their approach led to lasting and repeatable principles that generations of architects have used for many projects in academia and industry. Today, 99% of the more than 16 billion microprocessors produced annually are RISC processors, and are found in nearly all smartphones, tablets, and the billions of embedded devices that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT).
Hennessy and Patterson codified their insights in a very influential book, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, now in its sixth edition, reaching generations of engineers and scientists who have adopted and further developed their ideas. Their work underpins our ability to model and analyze the architectures of new processors, greatly accelerating advances in microprocessor design.
Source: HPCWire
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 23 2018, @06:19PM (4 children)
(Score: 1) by cocaine overdose on Friday March 23 2018, @06:26PM
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 24 2018, @12:30AM (2 children)
On modern x86 CPUs, under the hood at the microcode level, the x86 architecture is implemented with RISC, yes. But the architecture itself is decidedly CISC, and originally, the silicon was also CISC. And the architecture has only gone deeper into the CISC way, with the addition of the MMX and SSE instructions.
I forget which generation made the leap from CISC at the gate level to emulated CISC on top of a RISC core, maybe the Pentiums?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 24 2018, @03:01AM (1 child)
-ns.
So says Michael L. Schmit in "Pentium Processor Optimization Tools".
It's been out of print for fifteen years or so but Amazon yields the insight that it can be had used for $2.99.
It comes with an Assembly Code "Optimizer". What it does is generate commented source code that lets you know where such things as pipeline stalls occur.
Schmit's company disappeared not long after his book was publish. I figured it got acquired but I've never heard of any more-recent versions of his Assembly Code Optimizer.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Saturday March 24 2018, @04:45AM
Sometimes it does. Address calculations make good candidates for parallel execution, so something like MOV EAX,[EBX+ECX*4] might run just as fast as a plain MOV EAX,[EBX]. Old-timey assembler favorites like XLAT or LOOP are probably not optimal. Chip makers pick and choose which opcodes they will optimize (in the Athlon 64 docs they refer to "direct path" and "vector path") and it seems like sometimes the cpu is built to accomodate compilers and other times the opposite is true.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday March 23 2018, @06:24PM (1 child)
IBM's Tiny Computer for Anti-Counterfeiting [soylentnews.org]
Computers are now disposable, but they come with great surveillance.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday March 24 2018, @12:10AM
1. install a Linux on them
2. throw some hundred of thousands of them on a desk
3. voila!... the year of Linux on desktop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday March 23 2018, @06:48PM (3 children)
Having learnt with the H/P bible at school and its happy RISC fictional architecture (yes i has been implemented in FPGAs), it was quite a shock to walk in the first job.
There, the "RISC" architecture was the super-bloated PowerPC, where the "reduced" instruction set was about 300 pages long.
Fun times, and always remember to eieio.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 23 2018, @08:31PM (2 children)
RISC was a religious thing when I was in grad school (late 1980s) - it can definitely be taken too far. Back then, there were people seriously advocating for minimal systems that were just barely Turing complete - arguing that the hardware could be optimized so much faster that it would execute the bloated software faster overall. (Spoiler: it can't when you take it too far.)
When clock speed leveled out around 2006/4GHz, I thought we were done worshiping RISC and instead started to worship the warring Gods of parallel processors and specialized processors like dedicated 64 bit floating point math units, special instructions to optimize image processing, etc.?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Friday March 23 2018, @08:45PM (1 child)
I remember the hype built-up prior to launch of HP/PA (Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture) based computers in 1986/87. It was supposed to be a revolution in the computing world. Sadly, the computers never lived up to their hype and over the years HP probably realised that they were beating a dead horse. In the mean time, HP also partnered with Intel to promote the HP/PA architecture but that was, too little, too late. HP stopped selling PA-RISC-based HP 9000 systems at the end of 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC [wikipedia.org]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Uncle_Al on Friday March 23 2018, @09:46PM
Nope, that was Itanium.
PA development suffered as resources were drained to support that.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 23 2018, @10:21PM
s/retired/Emeritus/
FTFY
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 23 2018, @10:42PM (1 child)
im from atlanta and whats a computer?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 24 2018, @03:02AM
He lives in Atlanta.
Tell him Mike sent you.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday March 23 2018, @11:34PM (1 child)
Software guy here, just curious how modern CPUs work. The books are great reading if you're into that kinda thing (which I am). Then again, I do embedded software, having started from testing/fixing analog hardware in the 70s.
I remember the first time I encountered a digital circuit. An o'scope with 4 inputs, analog me put them on data lines and could not make head nor tales out of them. Some dude old enough to be my dad taught me about clocks and such, I can picture his face but can't for the life of me remember his name. Hat tip to some 40 y/o dude working at Wavetek around '70/'80.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday March 23 2018, @11:41PM
That's 79/80, not 70/80. I turned 21 at that job, worked night shift. When I turned 21 a couple co-workers and I went to the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa and shut the place down . I went there on my own the next night, got 2-3 free drinks. Ordered another and waitress came back saying the bartender wanted to talk to me. He said if I tried to get another free drink he would not only kick me out, but would blacklist me from the bar.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.