If one big complex thread being executed too fast is risky as we saw, because there’s a physical limit to sheer clock speed and cheating optimisations are unsafe, then, we all know the other option: what about doing many simple and small things independently? To put it differently: if we cannot make the clock any […]
Author: Nelson Vides
Processors, Part Two: the Present. Meltdown and Spectre
Imagine a restaurant. A professional chef, in charge of the best pizzas in town, and nobody knows how’re they done. It’s such a secret, those magic ingredients. And imagine a bunch of apprentices, supposed to help him. Imagine them following the chef’s orders. And then see, the chef going to the fridge to take some […]
Processors, Part One: the Past. The Architecture
How to widen the bottleneck of processing? If the solution were trivial, it wouldn’t merit a post – in fact the workarounds are of the kind that’s easy to invent but hard to formalise. Like the megapixels are not a true indicator of the quality of a camera, or the decibels are not a true […]
On so called low-level and performant languages
Last time, we dug into a new debate: are languages really decoupled from the hardware that runs them? Are the semantics of a language modelling mainstream hardware, and should they? Can we escape to new models of hardware, and new models of semantics? We saw that Backus made a good point arguing that languages have […]
Backus on Von Neumann at the Turing Award
On a previous post, we talked about Von Neumann’s Turing Complete model for a computer. A CPU, some Memory, and I/O. It was beautiful, but it had its disadvantages, and an unfortunate legacy. Today, John Backus will lead our journey through these matters. Enter Sandman: Backus 32 years later, a thorough critique was addressed, ironically, […]
The Von Neumann Architecture, a friend and a foe
Von Neumann, another star from Göttingen, gave the next important step in computation after Turing (checkout my previous post for Turing’s first step), in a way that, to this day, you can’t talk about computers without talking about Von Neumann. Which came first: the Hardware, or the Software and Languages? In an analogous way to […]
What has Turing given to us
Last time, I mentioned to have befriended Alan Turing. Who? You might fairly ask. Why? Those who already know him might add. Let me answer those questions. Three years ago (pretty accurately), Leon and I were passing by Göttingen. It was our first bike trip, and along the road, we agreed this city was a […]
How I befriended Alan Turing
While Leon has been learning about arts, and he as been writing about it, I caught up with a hobby of my own as well, but I have been silent about it. I befriended Alan Turing. And it’s time I talk about it. Let me keep it short so I can get to the point. Some […]
Back to where we started
What a better way to celebrate a second anniversary in Kraków than by arriving back to the city through the same route that took me before? Münster-to-Krakow can be done many times, and it has been my pleasure to reassure that you do not necessarily need 9 weeks for that. Although to be fair, 9 […]
Lonely Day, Sad Day
A day like today – I know it’s yesterday, but allow me please the time-shift, due to my night-owl habits – is one of those sad days almost by definition. Of all the million things I could write about, of all those trips and plans and life-changing moments and whatnot. There is one I want […]