By chance, I got to attend a day at the UPMARC Summer School with a very enjoyable talk by Francesco Zappa Nardelli from INRIA. He described his work (along with others) on understanding and modeling multiprocessor memory models. It is a very complex subject, but he managed to explain it very well.
Tag: ARM
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.
Microsoft + ARM = ARM64?
The recent news that Microsoft has taken out an ARM architectural license has caused a lot of speculation about just what this might mean. There are several quite well reasoned ideas around the web, and I have one idea of my own: sixty-four bits.
Concurrency in Lego Mindstorms NXT
For my parental leave, I have just bought myself a Lego Mindstorm NXT 2.0 kit. It is not much fun for our youngest, who mostly gets a bit scared by a piece of Lego driving around making noises, but I hope to be able to use it to teach my older child (almost five) to program. Let’s see how that turns out. It looks hard to make the NXT environment provide the kind of Roborally-style programming blocks that I had hoped to create, as I cannot for some reason get a sufficiently custom icon onto custom blocks.
It also presented me with an opportunity to try some domain-specific high-level graphical programming. The programming environment provided for the NXT series of Mindstorms kits is based on LabView from National Instruments, and it really does seem to work. It even features parallel tasks, which I tried to use…
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.