A few points about my experience buying a new laptop and going experimental the whole road, with linux.
hardware
Processors, Part Three: the Future. New models.
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]