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The Legacy of CPU Features Since 1980s
jones_supa writes: David Albert asked the following question:
"My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, logic, bit twiddling and shifting, and loading and storing things in memory. I'm vaguely aware of various newer developments like vector instructions (SIMD) and the idea that newer CPUs have support for virtualization (though I have no idea what that means in practice). What cool developments have I been missing? "
An article by Dan Luu answers this question and provides a good overview of various cool tricks modern CPUs can perform. The slightly older presentation Compiler++ by Jim Radigan also gives some insight on how C++ translates to modern instruction sets.
"My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, logic, bit twiddling and shifting, and loading and storing things in memory. I'm vaguely aware of various newer developments like vector instructions (SIMD) and the idea that newer CPUs have support for virtualization (though I have no idea what that means in practice). What cool developments have I been missing? "
An article by Dan Luu answers this question and provides a good overview of various cool tricks modern CPUs can perform. The slightly older presentation Compiler++ by Jim Radigan also gives some insight on how C++ translates to modern instruction sets.
That's the 1960s, friend. Conceptually, not much has changed since then, it's just that it took a while for our manufacturing/matter manipulation to get small enough to make enough reliable transistors to implement these ideas cheaply.
You probably *heard about these ideas* for the first time in the 1980s, though.
In the before time, in the long, long ago, Quarterdeck first offered DESQView. I built VMs operating Index BBS on i286 platforms using digiboards.
Sweet Jesus little has changed in >25 years.
As the submitted of this article, I recommend you to continue chucking in the articles that you find interesting. You seem to have 17 articles submitted, of which 6 have been published, which is pretty good actually. There's many factors that decide whether your submission gets the front page or not, so there's no need to be too personal about it. I personally keep submitting articles just for fun. Most of my topics come from Twitter these days, it's a good source to pick up interesting stuff.