Do you know why we have federal parks in the first place? Because the God damned corporations were looting our natural resources and destroying natural wonders.
No more low income housing? GREAT! Section 8ers get into the program as a result of horrible lifestyle choices and ruin any neighborhood that will let them in.
Uh huh. Once again demonstrating the best definition of a Libertarian:
A Libertarian is someone who, when he asks, "Am I my brother's keeper," answers in full confidence, "no."
Yes. Does a state have the capacity to set up its own geological survey. Not here in Minnesota we don't. We're too busy giving stadiums away to billionaires!
And yes, that was a joke. We are giving stadiums away but even if we didn't we still have about a $5 billion hole to fix in the next biennium.
Ok, now let's see the breakdown on where that money goes. How many other countries fund special education like we do? How many have to teach multiple non-native language speakers from a multitude of language backgrounds?
And finally...what is wrong with spending a lot of money on education?
Union/teachers first, kids second, if at all.
Well, the union's first responsibility is to its members. That's the whole point. Care for students is not in opposition to that. If the teachers aren't being treated fairly, how do you think that affects the classroom? You are making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about union members.
However, overall the blacks in the school do the worst. Boys do worse than girls. Asians do the best, and they aren't necessarily any better off financially than the blacks.
So either something about our society systematically keeps black students, particularly boys, at a disadvantage, or black people, particularly boys, and black culture are simply inferior to everyone else. I think I know which one is more likely given our history.
Sounds good. We'll just continue driving to make the rich richer, then. If the poor kids can't get ahead because they don't have a safe living environment, don't have enough money for good nutrition and don't have quality family time because mom and dad are working two or three jobs each, screw 'em.
In fact, we're near the top for the amount of money we spend per pupil.
Citation needed.
The problem is much of that is wasted: bloated administrations, feel-good PC courses that don't help core education
Such as...? What's bloated? What's "PC" and doesn't matter?
and teachers unions that flat-out admit they don't give a damn about students.
Now I know you're blathering. It would be supremely stupid for a teachers' union to publicly state such a thing. I know teachers. They are in a union. They care deeply about their students.
Add to that apathetic parents, and you have a crappy school system that won't get better no matter how much money we pump into it.
Yes, so we should just abandon those kids, right? There are socioeconomic factors that determine one's success in education. A primary one is structural racism.
This kind of thing happens all the time in any organized group of people. Procedures and policies get extablished and promptly ignored. I, for one, appreciate the UBS is being up-front about it.
It's also not unpopular opinions as such that get modded down, but any opinion that goes counter to the most childish ones, fanboyism and libertarianism.
I frequently post in opposition to libertarianism. I make what I think are intelligent and compelling points. Others seem to think so given moderation. So I don't see this as a systemic problem. It does happen, of course, but it's not all that common, I think.
Some way to track and not display what I already read would be nice and would help with this problem. So would e-mail alerts when a discussion or thread I mark or post to gets new comments.
I've tried to get started building a Drupal site a couple of times, first with 6, then with 7. Both times, I found the available books already hopelessly out of date and the on-line tutorials less than enlightening. I'm no technical slouch but I don't have gobs of free time, either. Can anyone recommend some good references that a Drupal novice can use to get a halfway decent looking, functional site going? I'd like to develop a simple custom theme so that site doesn't look obviously copied from some stock theme.
As technology advances and becomes more specialized, patents become less and less workable. Patents ultimately depend on patent offices and courts being able to make judgements on whether the patented invention is novel or obvious, whether the patent describes it in sufficient detail, whether another product infringes or, even, whether the subject area should be patentable
One way to fix this is to have experts in the field do the reviews. We do this now with scientific papers. What if every patent application required a corresponding publication in a peer-reviewed journal? I believe there is currently a one-year (or so) grace period for the publishing author to file a patent application because the idea is considered prior art.
Requiring peer-reviewed publication both spreads the idea and gets experts to verify it is novel and correct.
Yep, the test/mask instructions are a mess. Intel botched that big time. The two different mask schemes (sign bit and all-1's elements) are strange. I sort of understand why they did it, as an all-1's mask makes it easier to use bitwise operations to simulate predication, but who actually does it that way? The Larrabee proposal cleaned that up somewhat but it still wasn't quite what I'd want to see.
A lot of instructions on SSE are not really natural element-wise or reduction operations, but often affect only the low/high elements, or the low/high bits.
To clarify, you're talking about things like HADD and, with AVX, shuffles that only operate within 128-bit clusters? This is certainly driven by implementation challenges. In the old vector machines these were known as "cross-pipe" operations. You basically end up building a crossbar to implement reduction-type operations (pure reductions, compresses, snake shifts, etc.), So while I agree that these types of operations are very useful, they are also very expensive. SSE's lack of reduction-type operations is one of the major reasons I consider it far from a great vector ISA. So we're in agreement here.
The operations on integers are not consistent: sometimes they're only available for 8-bit, sometimes only for 16-bit or only for 32-bit. 16-bit multiplication is in SSE2 for example, but 32-bit multiplication is only in SSE4.1 and 8-bit and 64-bit multiplication still aren't available.
To be fair, I did say the lack of 64-bit multiply is an almost unforgivable sin.:) But yes, the integer operations are somewhat lacking. That said, how important are they? I am not a graphics expert but I would think the SSE contains the most important operations for graphics. That's what it was originally designed for, after all. In the HPC/scientific codes realm, anything less than 32-bit integers isn't terribly interesting.
That is, many of these instructions have a "short form" if you use a specific register (ie, ADD an immediate to AX). That's added complexity to the compiler and makes it harder to just use any available register if you also want efficient code.
That's not very difficult to handle in a compiler. It's pretty easy to tweak register assignment heuristics to prefer one register over another. Is it worth it? I think the jury's out on that. The text space savings can sometimes make a big difference.
Similarly, if you're stuck using a specific register with the DIV instruction that can conflict with a compiler optimizer as well because now there's a fixed use register mucking things up.
Again, this is easily handled in the compiler and I did admit moderately-used instructions like this are a bit ugly. So you'll get no disagreement from me. In the end, though, it doesn't really make code generators any more difficult.
Each register in the basic set has it's own special purpose which are required by some instruction or other, thus no register is general purpose.
I strongly disagree with this. There is a small number of instructions (like 3) that are regularly used that have "special" register operands. Otherwise, the only dedicated registers are rsp and rbp and usually you don't even need rbp and even that is set by the ABI, not the ISA (other than push/pop I suppose). I see codes all the time that use every single GPR other than rsp as a general purpose register.
Can you say more about this? What do you mean by "orthogonal" I certainly agree that SSE/AVX leaves a lot to be desired, but so do Altivec and NEON. None of them is a very good vector ISA. In what ways do you see Altivec and NEON as better designs? I am genuinely curious!
You make some good points. Let us remember that this is all tradeoffs. Maybe better choices could have been made, but they weren't "dumb" choices, which is what I hear a lot of people say.
Limited number of registers
Given the memory limits at the time, this was a reasonable tradeoff to gain text space. Solved somewhat with x86-64 but I agree it's not enough.
Instructions that require certain registers or a certain subset of the registers
Certainly. Thus my references to shift/DIV/MUL.
No three register operations. This impacts pipelining because it is not possible not overwrite one of the source registers.
Software pipelining? Yes. Fixed with AVX at least for the FP side. Integer instructions are still two-operand but it is less problematic there.
Variable instruction length makes decode a headache
It's also a great way to make the icache efficient. I think this was a good choice.
Lots of really bad stuff that isn't used much by modern code by still must be maintained for compatiblity: segments, 286 protection, IO instructions, etc.
Yep. And no one uses it anymore. AMD eliminated a good deal of it in x86-64.
the latest Core are not that different conceptually from the Pentium Pro, over 15 years old now.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. The x86 ISA has little, really nothing, to do with this. Most of the stuff in Pentium Pro was invented for big iron machines of the '60's and '70's. There's some novel stuff in there but most of it is riffs on a 40-year-old theme. That's true of basically every mainstream general-purpose processor out there.
I believe that the real test for x86 will be when Intel can no more come with a new process shrink every 2 years. This might be around 2018.
That's going to affect everyone, not just Intel. I think you're a bit pessimistic with 2018, but it is certainly coming.
I didn't read it in depth but what I remember from it was that it was a knee-of-the-curve result, not something where the paper authors thought there was 0 benefit to >32
Yes, that's what they argued, but frankly, it's not a valid result when gcc is your compiler. Wall wrote a very interesting paper on how to use 1000 registers. Compilers today don't even have to come close to any of the fancy tricks he talks about to suck up register resources.:)
but more importantly, it has implementation costs too. If you make a physical register file too large it will cease to perform like a register file.
We already have register files with hundreds of registers. They are used for O-O-O processing. They simply aren't ISA visible. Yes, there is a hardware limit, but even that is larger than people think it is. [Note: almost-shameless plug!] Techniques like register caching can be very effective, allowing very large register files with essentially the same performance as a small register file. Now, with every other architecture research study, take it with a very large grain of salt. But it is an interesting idea. It seems to me that ISA encoding is really the bigger problem.
There's also the concern of needing to save & restore too much state to make a context switch.
Yep, that is a big problem that most people ignore. There certainly is a balance to be struck. In many of the codes I see, 90% of the time is spent in inner loops with no calls, so this isn't generally a problem for those programs. OS effects are usually pretty minimal, but again that's HPC which is certainly quite different from a more general-purpose machine. As with any statement, evaluate it in the context provided.:)
The SSE extensions are ugly, if you're including that in the category of x86.
In what way are they ugly? To me they are "ugly" in the sense that it's not a general vector ISA but that is not what Intel was aiming for initially. Even AVX and the stuff pitched for Larrabee is not a great vector ISA. But SSE is reasonably functional and you can do quite a lot with it. I guess I am looking for specifics to better understand what I'm missing.:)
Lack of FMA support
Sure. I could name all sorts of things I would like to see in an ISA. But does that make it ugly, or just incomplete? I think you can have a beautiful ISA that is not complete.
It does tend to be slower than Power or z
Really? I have never heard that before and it doesn't line up with my experience. Not saying you're wrong but I would be very interested in reading studies that demonstrate this.
doesn't scale well
What do you mean by "scale?" Supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of cores have been built out of x86 chips.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, uh, he's wrong. At least if by "LLVM" one means to include Clang, which they usually do.
Currently-federal parks can go private.
Do you know why we have federal parks in the first place? Because the God damned corporations were looting our natural resources and destroying natural wonders.
No more low income housing? GREAT! Section 8ers get into the program as a result of horrible lifestyle choices and ruin any neighborhood that will let them in.
Uh huh. Once again demonstrating the best definition of a Libertarian:
A Libertarian is someone who, when he asks, "Am I my brother's keeper," answers in full confidence, "no."
The spending problem isn't NOAA or NIST, it's "entitlements"
B.S. Social Security is self-funded. Medicare and Medicaid would get much better if they could actually negotiate prices.
No, the real problem is the wealthy not paying their fair share and our unwillingness to pay for three wars.
Yes. Does a state have the capacity to set up its own geological survey. Not here in Minnesota we don't. We're too busy giving stadiums away to billionaires!
And yes, that was a joke. We are giving stadiums away but even if we didn't we still have about a $5 billion hole to fix in the next biennium.
What are you going to do to replace the revenue?
Looks like we're number four
Ok, now let's see the breakdown on where that money goes. How many other countries fund special education like we do? How many have to teach multiple non-native language speakers from a multitude of language backgrounds?
And finally...what is wrong with spending a lot of money on education?
Union/teachers first, kids second, if at all.
Well, the union's first responsibility is to its members. That's the whole point. Care for students is not in opposition to that. If the teachers aren't being treated fairly, how do you think that affects the classroom? You are making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about union members.
However, overall the blacks in the school do the worst. Boys do worse than girls. Asians do the best, and they aren't necessarily any better off financially than the blacks.
So either something about our society systematically keeps black students, particularly boys, at a disadvantage, or black people, particularly boys, and black culture are simply inferior to everyone else. I think I know which one is more likely given our history.
Sounds good. We'll just continue driving to make the rich richer, then. If the poor kids can't get ahead because they don't have a safe living environment, don't have enough money for good nutrition and don't have quality family time because mom and dad are working two or three jobs each, screw 'em.
In fact, we're near the top for the amount of money we spend per pupil.
Citation needed.
The problem is much of that is wasted: bloated administrations, feel-good PC courses that don't help core education
Such as...? What's bloated? What's "PC" and doesn't matter?
and teachers unions that flat-out admit they don't give a damn about students.
Now I know you're blathering. It would be supremely stupid for a teachers' union to publicly state such a thing. I know teachers. They are in a union. They care deeply about their students.
Add to that apathetic parents, and you have a crappy school system that won't get better no matter how much money we pump into it.
Yes, so we should just abandon those kids, right? There are socioeconomic factors that determine one's success in education. A primary one is structural racism.
This kind of thing happens all the time in any organized group of people. Procedures and policies get extablished and promptly ignored. I, for one, appreciate the UBS is being up-front about it.
It's also not unpopular opinions as such that get modded down, but any opinion that goes counter to the most childish ones, fanboyism and libertarianism.
I frequently post in opposition to libertarianism. I make what I think are intelligent and compelling points. Others seem to think so given moderation. So I don't see this as a systemic problem. It does happen, of course, but it's not all that common, I think.
Some way to track and not display what I already read would be nice and would help with this problem. So would e-mail alerts when a discussion or thread I mark or post to gets new comments.
I've tried to get started building a Drupal site a couple of times, first with 6, then with 7. Both times, I found the available books already hopelessly out of date and the on-line tutorials less than enlightening. I'm no technical slouch but I don't have gobs of free time, either. Can anyone recommend some good references that a Drupal novice can use to get a halfway decent looking, functional site going? I'd like to develop a simple custom theme so that site doesn't look obviously copied from some stock theme.
Thanks!
As technology advances and becomes more specialized, patents become less and less workable. Patents ultimately depend on patent offices and courts being able to make judgements on whether the patented invention is novel or obvious, whether the patent describes it in sufficient detail, whether another product infringes or, even, whether the subject area should be patentable
One way to fix this is to have experts in the field do the reviews. We do this now with scientific papers. What if every patent application required a corresponding publication in a peer-reviewed journal? I believe there is currently a one-year (or so) grace period for the publishing author to file a patent application because the idea is considered prior art.
Requiring peer-reviewed publication both spreads the idea and gets experts to verify it is novel and correct.
Yes, the network.
Micro Center serves some places in the Midwest.
Yep, the test/mask instructions are a mess. Intel botched that big time. The two different mask schemes (sign bit and all-1's elements) are strange. I sort of understand why they did it, as an all-1's mask makes it easier to use bitwise operations to simulate predication, but who actually does it that way? The Larrabee proposal cleaned that up somewhat but it still wasn't quite what I'd want to see.
A lot of instructions on SSE are not really natural element-wise or reduction operations, but often affect only the low/high elements, or the low/high bits.
To clarify, you're talking about things like HADD and, with AVX, shuffles that only operate within 128-bit clusters? This is certainly driven by implementation challenges. In the old vector machines these were known as "cross-pipe" operations. You basically end up building a crossbar to implement reduction-type operations (pure reductions, compresses, snake shifts, etc.), So while I agree that these types of operations are very useful, they are also very expensive. SSE's lack of reduction-type operations is one of the major reasons I consider it far from a great vector ISA. So we're in agreement here.
The operations on integers are not consistent: sometimes they're only available for 8-bit, sometimes only for 16-bit or only for 32-bit. 16-bit multiplication is in SSE2 for example, but 32-bit multiplication is only in SSE4.1 and 8-bit and 64-bit multiplication still aren't available.
To be fair, I did say the lack of 64-bit multiply is an almost unforgivable sin. :) But yes, the integer operations are somewhat lacking. That said, how important are they? I am not a graphics expert but I would think the SSE contains the most important operations for graphics. That's what it was originally designed for, after all. In the HPC/scientific codes realm, anything less than 32-bit integers isn't terribly interesting.
That is, many of these instructions have a "short form" if you use a specific register (ie, ADD an immediate to AX). That's added complexity to the compiler and makes it harder to just use any available register if you also want efficient code.
That's not very difficult to handle in a compiler. It's pretty easy to tweak register assignment heuristics to prefer one register over another. Is it worth it? I think the jury's out on that. The text space savings can sometimes make a big difference.
Similarly, if you're stuck using a specific register with the DIV instruction that can conflict with a compiler optimizer as well because now there's a fixed use register mucking things up.
Again, this is easily handled in the compiler and I did admit moderately-used instructions like this are a bit ugly. So you'll get no disagreement from me. In the end, though, it doesn't really make code generators any more difficult.
I think it has something to do with the ugly warts that the entire line inherited from the original 8086/8088 days...
Everything in that paragraph is truly ugly. It is also totally irrelevant today. Either no one uses them or they are gone in x86-64.
Each register in the basic set has it's own special purpose which are required by some instruction or other, thus no register is general purpose.
I strongly disagree with this. There is a small number of instructions (like 3) that are regularly used that have "special" register operands. Otherwise, the only dedicated registers are rsp and rbp and usually you don't even need rbp and even that is set by the ABI, not the ISA (other than push/pop I suppose). I see codes all the time that use every single GPR other than rsp as a general purpose register.
Can you say more about this? What do you mean by "orthogonal" I certainly agree that SSE/AVX leaves a lot to be desired, but so do Altivec and NEON. None of them is a very good vector ISA. In what ways do you see Altivec and NEON as better designs? I am genuinely curious!
You make some good points. Let us remember that this is all tradeoffs. Maybe better choices could have been made, but they weren't "dumb" choices, which is what I hear a lot of people say.
Limited number of registers
Given the memory limits at the time, this was a reasonable tradeoff to gain text space. Solved somewhat with x86-64 but I agree it's not enough.
Instructions that require certain registers or a certain subset of the registers
Certainly. Thus my references to shift/DIV/MUL.
No three register operations. This impacts pipelining because it is not possible not overwrite one of the source registers.
Software pipelining? Yes. Fixed with AVX at least for the FP side. Integer instructions are still two-operand but it is less problematic there.
Variable instruction length makes decode a headache
It's also a great way to make the icache efficient. I think this was a good choice.
Lots of really bad stuff that isn't used much by modern code by still must be maintained for compatiblity: segments, 286 protection, IO instructions, etc.
Yep. And no one uses it anymore. AMD eliminated a good deal of it in x86-64.
the latest Core are not that different conceptually from the Pentium Pro, over 15 years old now.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. The x86 ISA has little, really nothing, to do with this. Most of the stuff in Pentium Pro was invented for big iron machines of the '60's and '70's. There's some novel stuff in there but most of it is riffs on a 40-year-old theme. That's true of basically every mainstream general-purpose processor out there.
I believe that the real test for x86 will be when Intel can no more come with a new process shrink every 2 years. This might be around 2018.
That's going to affect everyone, not just Intel. I think you're a bit pessimistic with 2018, but it is certainly coming.
I didn't read it in depth but what I remember from it was that it was a knee-of-the-curve result, not something where the paper authors thought there was 0 benefit to >32
Yes, that's what they argued, but frankly, it's not a valid result when gcc is your compiler. Wall wrote a very interesting paper on how to use 1000 registers. Compilers today don't even have to come close to any of the fancy tricks he talks about to suck up register resources. :)
but more importantly, it has implementation costs too. If you make a physical register file too large it will cease to perform like a register file.
We already have register files with hundreds of registers. They are used for O-O-O processing. They simply aren't ISA visible. Yes, there is a hardware limit, but even that is larger than people think it is. [Note: almost-shameless plug!] Techniques like register caching can be very effective, allowing very large register files with essentially the same performance as a small register file. Now, with every other architecture research study, take it with a very large grain of salt. But it is an interesting idea. It seems to me that ISA encoding is really the bigger problem.
There's also the concern of needing to save & restore too much state to make a context switch.
Yep, that is a big problem that most people ignore. There certainly is a balance to be struck. In many of the codes I see, 90% of the time is spent in inner loops with no calls, so this isn't generally a problem for those programs. OS effects are usually pretty minimal, but again that's HPC which is certainly quite different from a more general-purpose machine. As with any statement, evaluate it in the context provided. :)
The SSE extensions are ugly, if you're including that in the category of x86.
In what way are they ugly? To me they are "ugly" in the sense that it's not a general vector ISA but that is not what Intel was aiming for initially. Even AVX and the stuff pitched for Larrabee is not a great vector ISA. But SSE is reasonably functional and you can do quite a lot with it. I guess I am looking for specifics to better understand what I'm missing. :)
Lack of FMA support
Sure. I could name all sorts of things I would like to see in an ISA. But does that make it ugly, or just incomplete? I think you can have a beautiful ISA that is not complete.
It does tend to be slower than Power or z
Really? I have never heard that before and it doesn't line up with my experience. Not saying you're wrong but I would be very interested in reading studies that demonstrate this.
doesn't scale well
What do you mean by "scale?" Supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of cores have been built out of x86 chips.