Thoughts and Ramblings

Apologies if this is technical, but since I learned something in this experiment, I thought I would write it up:

I remember going to a seminar a few weeks ago delivered by a faculty candidate which discussed the idea of how to get around the branch mis-prediction problem present in microprocessors. Anyway, her idea was to use predicated statements to make the instructions conditional on a comparison which may not have been completed yet. Essentially, when faced with a decision between two routes, the processor starts computation on both before it is even sure which it should take. Then, when the decision is known, it can proceed to throw out the results from the task it should not have started and only keep the results from the other. Her research mentioned using the processor’s internal register renaming system to prevent the results from the two colliding. There is a problem of both processor support as well as compiler support, as well as the fact that the active power in the processor is now increased. From the first two issues, I doubt we will ever see this come to light, especially when such things are already possible:

Well, it has been a long time since I posted here. The reason is not lack of things to say, but in fact the opposite. Much has been going on, but so much of it is in an unresolved state, I don’t want to say anything here about it (since this is open to the public). I can say that I finally quite as the sysadmin. I told my advisor that that it was effective immediately. He didn’t try to stop me, but also there really is nothing he can do about it. I didn’t sign a contract, and I am not paid. The real question in my mind is why do it?

Well, the semester is now into its third week and things are going alright. I just had my first week of teaching lab, and things pretty much went as expected. The problem is that the students are expected to do some assembly within lab, but non of them have seen x86 assembly in class yet. Essentially, I had the fun of teaching them the basics of assembly just so they could do the lab.