Post AtANjrdzHefLRHhs4O by kornel@mastodon.social
 (DIR) More posts by kornel@mastodon.social
 (DIR) Post #AtANjrdzHefLRHhs4O by kornel@mastodon.social
       2025-04-16T01:34:48Z
       
       4 likes, 1 repeats
       
       What if C isn't portable, only non-C-compatible architectures went extinct?I'm half joking, but:VLIW/EPIC architectures are dead, despite CPUs desperately needing instruction-level parallelism.Instead of SIMT we have hyperthreading at home, and bug-prone threads with context switching in software.Instead of hierarchical memory, we waste 8 bytes on all pointers & emulate thread-local memory in software. Larabee was DOA & SIMD barely exists. MOS6502-style stack+registers are only on GPUs.
       
 (DIR) Post #AtH6EtcZXoM3ToPaGO by gentoobro@shitpost.cloud
       2025-04-20T07:08:19.091511Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       What if hardware converged on the architectures that offer the most true performance? It's interesting how ARM and x86-64 chips, the only truly fast ones out there, are extremely similar in the grand scheme of CPU architectures. The PS3 Cell processor was fast as hell in theory, but nobody could write useful software for it because of the complexity and limitations of doing so. SMT won and AMD's weird Bulldozer pseudocore thing lost. CISC won then lost (too complicated to implement fast) then won (but it's secretly a RISC inside) with x86, whereas on ARM RISC won then lost (couldn't take advantage of more complex hardware) then won again (but we swear all the extensions aren't CISC).
       
 (DIR) Post #AtHsDtOdgqAiIETvcm by PalePimp@poa.st
       2025-04-20T16:05:58.128025Z
       
       1 likes, 1 repeats
       
       @gentoobro @kornel And the best assembler is still the MC68K with difference, IMHO nothing has ever come close to it again.