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Cliff Click's Crash Course In Modern Hardware

Posted by timothy on from the first-there-were-the-dinosaurs dept.

Lord Straxus writes "In this presentation (video) from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click talks about why it's almost impossible to tell what an x86 chip is really doing to your code due to all of the crazy kung-fu and ninjitsu it does to your code while it's running. This talk is an excellent drill-down into the internals of the x86 chip, and it's a great way to get an understanding of what really goes on down at the hardware and why certain types of applications run so much faster than other types of applications. Dr. Cliff really knows his stuff!"

6 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Could someone give me a crash course by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    on the website? I'm not sure what I'm looking at...

    1. Re:Could someone give me a crash course by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 5, Funny

      Probably due to your x86 processor doing all sorts of monkeying with the code.

    2. Re:Could someone give me a crash course by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Spaghetti code can be hard to digest.

    3. Re:Could someone give me a crash course by Icegryphon · · Score: 5, Funny

      Spaghetti code can be hard to digest.

      Sounds to me like someone is using stale Copypasta.

  2. Re:Fast forward... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Funny

    The first four minutes of the video are spent asking which topic the room wants to see. No need to watch that part. Then it gets more interesting.

    That's just the branch predictor pre-loading the cache for each possible conditional result.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  3. Re:Premature optimization is evil... and stupid by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 4, Funny

    And messy and embarrassing. Oh, wait...