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The Legacy of CPU Features Since 1980s

Posted by Soulskill on from the it-slices-it-dices-it-juliennes-fries dept.

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.

5 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Virtualisation dates from the 1960's ! by Eunuchswear · · Score: 5, Informative

    The first large scale availability of virtualisation was with the IBM 370 series, dating from June 30, 1970, but it had been available on some other machines in the 1960's.

    So the idea that "newer machines have support for virtualisation" is a bit old.

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    Watch this Heartland Institute video
  2. Re:1980s? by Opie812 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Then it's settled. Your edge case must apply to everybody. The article is wrong.

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    I'm not a nerd. Nerds are smart.
  3. Yeah, I remember when VMWare first came out... by sirwired · · Score: 5, Informative

    I remember when VMWare first came out, and there was all this amazement about all the cool things you could do with Virtual Machines. Very little mention anywhere that these were things you could do for decades already on mainframes.

    Same thing with I/O offloading (compared to mainframes, x86 and UNIX I/O offload is still quite primitive and rudimentary), DB-based filesystems (MS has been trying to ship one of those for over 20 years now; IBM has been successfully selling one (the AS/400 / iSeries) for 25, built-in encryption features, and a host of other features.

    1. Re:Yeah, I remember when VMWare first came out... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Funny

      Bugger me, when I first got hold of VMWare as a teenager then heavily into Linux, I went mad. And I mean maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.

      My home server was a simple affair - 6GB hard disk, 512MB ram.

      So what did I do? Bring up as many Redhat VMs as I could - all with 4MB ram :D It was like a drug, 10 wasn't enough, so I did more. I got to 50 and just knew I had to do 100. I eventually ran out of free ram, but hell, I had more than 100 servers at my disposal!

      What did I do with them? Uhm, nothing. Apart from sshing into a few just because I could.

      *sigh* Thems were the days....

  4. What happened to my /.? by DahGhostfacedFiddlah · · Score: 5, Funny

    We just had a story about low-level improvements to the BSD kernel, and now we get an article about chip-level features and how compilers use them?

    Is this some sort of pre-April-Fools /. in 2000 joke? Where are my Slashvertisements for gadgets I'll never hear about again? My uninformed blog posts declaring this the "year of Functional Declarative Inverted Programming in YAFadL"? Where the hell are my 3000-word /. editor opinions on the latest movie?

    If this keeps up, this site might start soaking up some of my time instead of simply being a place I check due to old habits.

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    Last post!