I completely agree with this observation. In fact, you can use this to your advantage to save time. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, Blizzard released "Classic" World of Warcraft and I had this huge itch to play the game. I satisfied it by watching YouTube videos on Classic WoW instead.
Did I waste time watching WoW YouTube videos? Yes. Did I save much more time by tricking my brain into thinking I was playing the game when I actually wasn't? Yes!
Similarly, Doug DeMuro quirks videos have saved me millions (which I do not have) on 80s and 90s dream cars.
That Porsche 928 or Lamborghini Countach or the ultimate teenage dream Vector W8? Fun to look at the videos but realistically it would not be fun to own and maintain one.
There are ideas here but I am not seeing a way to make them realistic. Ideally an ad containing any actors would somehow be signed by that actor, but with the amount of different platforms and formats I don't really see a practical solution.
How would the ad get signed and when, and how would it stay valid across placements?
I've started playing around with the idea of building a better retirement/goals investment calculator/tracker for Indians.
The retirement calculators available online are almost farcical in their simplicity and assumptions. And the ones offered by professional, fee-only financial advisors (I engaged one) are just clunky, uneasy to use excel sheets. They do the job of course, but I think there has to be an easier, more intuitive way to tracking goals/investments.
I know way too many of my friends and acquaintances - educated, fairly wealthy people - who seem to have almost no idea on how to plan/track goals/retirement. It'd be fantastic if I could make something which helps them and others like them.
* A THRIVE/SURVIVE THEORY OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM [1] - Still the best theory on the conservative/liberal divide. It changed how I view the conservative viewpoint and helped me understand it better.
* MEDITATIONS ON MOLOCH [2] - One of the most famous blog posts on the internet (certainly in HN circles at least). Part fantasy, part philosophy, part game-theory - all of it brilliant. It changed how I approach my life goals and what I need to optimize for in life.
A blog post so famous that it has it's own podcast[3]!
I can't comment on the economics of it but I can comment on the technical difficulties. The issue for x86 cores is keeping the ROB fed with instructions - no point in building a huge OoO if you can't keep it fed with instructions.
Keeping the ROB full falls on the engineering of the front-end, and here is where CISC v RISC plays a role. The variable length of x86 has implications beyond decode. The BTB design becomes simpler with a RISC ISA since a branch can only lie in certain chunks in a fetched instruction cache line in a RISC design (not so in CISC). RISC also makes other aspects of BPU design simpler - but I digress. Bottom line, Intel and AMD might not have a large ROB due to inherent differences in the front-end which prevent larger size ROBs from being fed with instructions.
(Note that CISC definitely does have it's advantages - especially in large code foot-print server workloads where the dense packing of instructions help - but it might be hindered in typical desktop workloads)
Source: I've worked in front-end CPU micro-architecture research for ~5 years
How do you feel about RISC-V compact instructions? The resulting code seems to be 10-15% smaller than x86 in practice (25-30% smaller than aarch64) while not requiring the weirdness and mode-switching associated with thumb or MIPS16e.
Has there actually been much research into increasing instruction density without significantly complicating decode?
Given the move toward wide decoders, has there been any work on the idea of using fixed-size instruction blocks and huffman encoding?
I can't really comment on the tradeoffs between specific ISAs since I've mainly worked on micro-arch research (which is ISA agnostic for most of the pipeline).
As for the questions on research into looking at decode complexity v instruction density tradeoff - I'm not aware of any recent work but you've got me excited to go dig up some papers now. I suspect any work done would be fairly old - back in the days when ISA research was active. Similar to compiler front-end work (think lex, yacc, grammar etc..) ISA research is not an active area currently. But maybe it's time to revisit it?
Also, I'm not sure if Huffman encoding is applicable to a fixed-size ISA. Wouldn't it be applicable only in a variable size ISA where you devote smaller size encoding to more frequent instructions?
Fixed instruction block was referring to the Huffman encoding. Something like 8 or 16kb per instruction block (perhaps set by a flag?). Compilers would have to optimize to stay within the block, but they optimize for sticking in L1 cache anyway.
Since we're going all-in on code density, let's go with a semi-accumulator 16-bit ISA. 8 bits for instructions, 8 bits for registers (with 32 total registers). We'll split into 5 bits and 3 bits. 5-bits gives access to all registers since quite a few are either read-only (zero register, flag register) or write occasionally (stack pointer, instruction counter). The remaining 3 bits specify 8 registers that can be the write target. There will be slightly more moves, but that just means that moves compress better and seems like it should enforce certain register patterns being used more frequently which is also better for compression.
We can take advantage of having 2 separate domains (one for each byte) to create 2 separate Huffman trees. In the worst case, it seems like we increase our code size, but in more typical cases where we're using just a few instructions a lot and using a few registers a lot, the output size should be smaller. While our worst-case lookup would be 8 deep, more domain-specific lookup would probably be more likely to keep the depth lower. In addition, two trees means we can process each instruction in parallel.
As a final optimization tradeoff, I believe you could do a modified Huffman that always encoded a fixed number of bits (eg, 2, 4, 6, or 8) which would half theoretical decode time at the expense of an extra bit on some encodings. it would be +25% for 3-bit encoding, but only 16% for 5-bit encoding (perhaps step 2, 3, 4, 6, 8). For even wider decode, we could trade off a little more by forcing the compiler to ensure that each Huffman encoding breaks evenly every N bytes so we can setup multiple encoders in advance. This would probably add quite a bit to compiling time, but would be a huge performance and scaling advantage.
Immediates are where things get a little strange. The biggest problem is that the immediate value is basically random so it messes up encoding, but otherwise it messes with data fetching. The best solution seems to be replacing the 5-bit register address with either 5 bits of data or 6 bits (one implied) of jump immediate.
Never gave it too much thought before now, but it's an interesting exercise.
Yes. TAGE still does better than perceptron, but combining the two is likely to give you the best performance currently. Of course, all this is dependent on area allocated to the predictor and the workloads being run.
While this is completely valid advice, it might not be applicable with junior faculty who may not have graduated many students. I chose my advisor (who was as assistant professor at the time) based on the belief that I'll get to publish aggressively since it's in both of our interests. But I had no way of knowing how hard it would be to work with her. And I wasn't the only person who felt this way; I saw my fellow group mates (all of us joined the group at around the same time) and other collaborators express similar sentiments in course of time. But since I'd already sunk in time, I decided to stick around.
I was able to successfully complete my PhD, but I took more time than expected. Moreover, I was no way near as productive as I'd hoped to.
I've heard this view echoed by friends who've visited China (I'm Indian). A major reason for this difference might be the fact that China opened up its markets in the late 1970's while India's market liberalization happened only in 1991.
Did I waste time watching WoW YouTube videos? Yes. Did I save much more time by tricking my brain into thinking I was playing the game when I actually wasn't? Yes!