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posted by martyb on Saturday October 31 2015, @03:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the A|Journey|Through|the|CPU|Pipeline dept.

It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career.

What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a "deep" 31-stage pipeline?

Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside.

As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it?

A primer for those with a less formal background.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 31 2015, @08:09PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday October 31 2015, @08:09PM (#256978) Journal

    That's ridiculous. You can write bad code in any language. This is more or less exactly the same problem as insurance. Insurance doesn't make people any safer either, it just gives people license to do things that are more reckless than what they would have had to do, because there's something there that's supposed to protect them.

    It's a correct observation. So what makes it ridiculous?

    And the point of insurance is not to make people safer.

    Yes, it will probably catch some types of mistake that lead to problems

    There we go.

    but they're not going to catch all the bugs

    It's not perfect so it's no good.