When I grew up with computers, the big RISC vs CISC debate was raging. At the time, in the late 1980s, it did indeed seem that RISC was inherently superior to CISC. SPARCs, MIPS, and Alpha all outpaced boring old x86, VAX and 68000 processors. This turned out to be a historical parenthesis, as the Pentium Pro from Intel showed how RISC-style performance could be mated to a CISC ISA. However, maybe ISAs still do matter.
Tag Archives: Intel
Does ISA Matter for Performance?
Wind River Blog: Crystal Forest on Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about Simics running a model of the new Intel Crystal Forest platform. Crystal Forest is a very complex piece of hardware, but I am pretty happy that we managed to demo it in an understandable way – by essentially using it as a black box and putting a pretty display on top of that (using Eclipse).
S4D 2010
Looks like S4D (and the co-located FDL) is becoming my most regular conference. S4D is a very interactive event. With some 20 to 30 people in the room, many of them also presenting papers at the conference, it turns into a workshop at its best. There were plenty of discussion going on during sessions and the breaks, and I think we all got new insights and ideas.
Is Cycle Accuracy a bad Idea?
In a funny coincidence, I published an article at SCDSource.com about the need for cycle-accurate models for virtual platforms on the same day that ARM announced that they were selling their cycle-accurate simulators and associated tool chain to Carbon Technology. That makes one wonder where cycle-accuracy is going, or whether it is a valid idea at all… is ARM right or am I right, or are we both right since we are talking about different things?
Let’s look at this in more detail.
David Ditzel Interview at The Register/Semicoherent Computing
The Register has a few podcasts in addition to their website, and the one called “Semicoherent Computing” has turned into a very nice series of interviews with interesting people from the computer industry. I recently listened to their interview from September 2007 with David Ditzel of Transmeta fame. He had a lot to say about the history of computing, as well as interesting things on where computing is going. Well worth a listen! Particular interesting highlights…
More Odd Targets
PC Perspective writes in its IDF writeup about Intel’s upcoming Dunnington device with six cores on a die. Another break from the 2-4-8 powers-of-two progression. Feels oddly refreshing, even if it is really nothing very strange about it. Just like AMDs triple-core.
Book Review: Intel’s Multicore Programming Book
The book “Multicore Programming – Increasing Performance through Software Multithreading” by Shameem Akhter and Jason Roberts is part of a series of books put out by Intel in their multicore software push. In case you have not noticed, Intel has a huge market push currently where they give seminars, publish articles and books, and give curricula to universities in order to get more parallel software in place. I read this book recently, and here is a short review.
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Intel ARK
Intel has a really neat tool on their homepage: the Intel ARK — Automated Relational Knowledgebase. It is a horrible name for a brilliant tool: it lets you search for processor names, codenames, chipsets, and jump around in a database of processor variants, compatible chipsets, feature lists, and more. Not that I care particularly about Intel chips, but the tool is something everyone selling silicon devices should copy. Being able to quickly figure out just what is inside a certain device (and what is not), and finding related devices and compatible chips is just brilliant for curious people, customers, and supporting services.
Please, everybody else?