My colleague Igor Ostrovsky has written a useful summary of seven cache memory effects that every advanced developer should know about because of their performance impact, particularly as we strive to keep invisible bottlenecks out of parallel code. I’ve covered variations of Igor’s examples #1, #2, #3, and #6 in my Machine Architecture talk and [...]
Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category
Igor Ostrovsky and the Seven Cache Effects
Posted in Concurrency, Hardware, Software Development on 2010-02-15 | 1 Comment »
Effective Concurrency: Design for Manycore Systems
Posted in Concurrency, Hardware, Opinion & Editorial, Software Development on 2009-08-11 | 5 Comments »
This month’s Effective Concurrency column, Design for Manycore Systems, is now live on DDJ’s website. From the article: Why worry about “manycore” today? Dual- and quad-core computers are obviously here to stay for mainstream desktops and notebooks. But do we really need to think about "many-core" systems if we’re building a typical mainstream application right [...]
Effective Concurrency: Eliminate False Sharing
Posted in C# / .NET, C++, Concurrency, Hardware, Software Development on 2009-05-15 | 10 Comments »
This month’s Effective Concurrency column, “Eliminate False Sharing”, is now live on DDJ’s website. People keep writing asking me about my previous mentions of false sharing, even debating whether it’s really a problem. So this month I decided to treat it in depth, including: A compelling and realistic example where just changing a couple of [...]
Answer to "16 Technologies": Engelbart and the Mother of All Demos
Posted in Hardware, Opinion & Editorial, Software Development on 2009-01-08 | 10 Comments »
A few days ago I posted a challenge to name the researcher/team and approximate year each of the following 16 important technologies was first demonstrated. In brief, they were: The personal computer for dedicated individual use all day long. The mouse. Internetworks. Network service discovery. Live collaboration and desktop/app sharing. Hierarchical structure within a file [...]
16 Important Technologies: Who demonstrated each one first?
Posted in Hardware, Opinion & Editorial, Software Development on 2009-01-05 | 13 Comments »
We enjoy such an abundance of computing riches that it’s easy to take wonderful technological ideas for granted. Yet so many of the pieces of our modern computing experience that we consider routine today were at one time unimaginable. After all, back in the early days of computing, we were still discovering what these newfangled [...]
Research Firms Are Good At Research, Not Technology Predictions
Posted in Hardware, Opinion & Editorial on 2008-07-21 | 6 Comments »
This story has been picked up semi-widely since last night. I’m sure this Steven Prentice they quote is a fine (Gartner) Fellow, but really: The computer mouse is set to die out in the next five years and will be usurped by touch screens and facial recognition, analysts believe. Seriously, does anyone who uses computers [...]
Kindling
Posted in Hardware, Opinion & Editorial on 2008-07-16 | 10 Comments »
Two weeks ago, I broke down and bought a Kindle. I like it: It’s a good and well-designed reader, and the experience is much better than the other e-book reading I’ve done before on phones and PDAs. I like how when you bookmark a page, you can see it… the corner of the page gets [...]
Quad-core a "waste of electricity"?
Posted in C++, Concurrency, Hardware, Software Development on 2008-04-18 | 26 Comments »
Jeff Atwood wrote: In my opinion, quad-core CPUs are still a waste of electricity unless you’re putting them in a server. Four cores on the desktop is great for bragging rights and mathematical superiority (yep, 4 > 2), but those four cores provide almost no benchmarkable improvement in the type of applications most people use. [...]
Welcome to Silicon Miami: The System-On-a-Chip Evolution
Posted in Hardware on 2007-03-05 | 1 Comment »
A lot of people seem to have opinions about whether hardware trends are generally moving things on-chip or off-chip. I just saw another discussion about this on Slashdot today. Here’s part of the summary of that article: "In the near future the Central Processing Unit (CPU) will not be as central anymore. AMD has announced [...]
