My thoughts on software in general over the past 20 years. So many programs inefficiently written and in 4th level languages just eats up any CPU/memory gain. (Less soap box and more of a curious what if to how fast things would be if we still wrote highly optimized programs)
Answer: there’d be far less software in the world, it would all be more archaic and less useful, and our phones and laptops would just sit at 2% utilization most of the time.
There’s an opportunity cost to everything, including fussing over whether that value can be stored as an int instead of a double to save 8 bits of space. High level languages let developers express their feature and business logic faster, with fewer bugs, and much lower ongoing maintenance costs.
I fully concur. There’s tons of really inefficient software out there that wastes resources just because for a long time, available resources grew fast enough to just keep using more of them without the net speed of an application slowing down.
If we didn’t have so many lazy SW devs, I suspect the reduction in needed CPU cycles would have a measurable positive effect on climate change.
No, that’s not what RISC is about. There was some early attempts to keep the number of instructions low–originally, ARM didn’t have a multiply instruction, and there’s still a bunch of microcontrollers you can buy that don’t have a divide instruction–but it was quickly abandoned as it’s just not that useful. It only holds back instructions that optimize common cases. Your compiler can implement multiplication by doing addition in a loop, but that’s not very efficient.
What really worked about it was keeping a separation between how memory is accessed. You don’t have an ADD instruction that can fetch from both registers or main memory. You have a MOV instruction that can fetch from memory into a register, and you have an ADD instruction that can work on registers.
I’m a computer engineering major (still a student tbf), I’m well aware of the difference between CISC and RISC, I was making a joke.
Also, I understand your point, but you should know though that a load-store architecture and a RISC instruction set are not the same thing. The vast majority of RISC ISAs are load-store, but not all load-store architectures are RISC.
MOST RISCs:
3a) Have 1 size of instruction in an instruction stream
3b) And that size is 4 bytes
3c) Have a handful (1-4) addressing modes) (* it is VERY
hard to count these things; will discuss later).
3d) Have NO indirect addressing in any form (i.e., where you need
one memory access to get the address of another operand in memory)
4a) Have NO operations that combine load/store with arithmetic,
i.e., like add from memory, or add to memory.
(note: this means especially avoiding operations that use the
value of a load as input to an ALU operation, especially when
that operation can cause an exception. Loads/stores with
address modification can often be OK as they don’t have some of
the bad effects)
4b) Have no more than 1 memory-addressed operand per instruction
5a) Do NOT support arbitrary alignment of data for loads/stores
5b) Use an MMU for a data address no more than once per instruction
6a) Have >=5 bits per integer register specifier
6b) Have >= 4 bits per FP register specifier
Note that none of this has to do with reducing the number of instructions, which is what people tend to think of when they hear the name.
All instructions occupy the same amount of space in memory.
Both ARM and RISC-V have compressed instructions. Dunno how ARM works but with RISC-V the 16-bit instruction set is freely interspersable with the 32 bit one, which also get their alignment reduced to 16 bits. Gets like 95% of the space reduction possible with full variable-width instructions without overcomplicating the insn decoder.
As to addressing and loads and arithmetic: No such instructions, but every CPU but the tiniest ones are expected to do macro-op fusion for things like indexed loads. Here’s an overview.
The MMU thing… well the vector extension can do gather/scatter, I guess it could stay within the letter of “use the MMU once” but definitely not the spirit.
The website title says “Arm Developer”, not “ARM Developer”, in a clearly non-acronym way so it’s a guide for making prosthetic hardware. Of course you want a cyborg arm to parse JS natively, why else even get one?
Nope it’s still a register-register op, that’s very much load-store architecture.
It’s reduced, not minimalist, otherwise every RISC CPU out there would only have one instruction like decrement and branch if nonzero. RISC-V would not have an extension mechanism. The instruction exists because it makes things faster because you don’t have to do manual bit-fiddling over 10 instructions to achieve a thing already-existing ALU logic can do in a single cycle. A thing that isn’t even javascript-specific (or terribly relevant to json), it’s a specific float to int cast with specific rounding and overflow mode. Would it more palatable to your tastes if the CPU were to do macro-op fusion on 10(!) instructions to get the same result?
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Well, do you have dedicated JSON hardware?
Please no, don’t subsidize anything Java-Script. It will only make it less efficient.
My thoughts on software in general over the past 20 years. So many programs inefficiently written and in 4th level languages just eats up any CPU/memory gain. (Less soap box and more of a curious what if to how fast things would be if we still wrote highly optimized programs)
Answer: there’d be far less software in the world, it would all be more archaic and less useful, and our phones and laptops would just sit at 2% utilization most of the time.
There’s an opportunity cost to everything, including fussing over whether that value can be stored as an int instead of a double to save 8 bits of space. High level languages let developers express their feature and business logic faster, with fewer bugs, and much lower ongoing maintenance costs.
Even if our apps used resources better the adware will just use the free space.
I fully concur. There’s tons of really inefficient software out there that wastes resources just because for a long time, available resources grew fast enough to just keep using more of them without the net speed of an application slowing down. If we didn’t have so many lazy SW devs, I suspect the reduction in needed CPU cycles would have a measurable positive effect on climate change.
And thus JsPU was born from Lemmy
I’ll take 10. Here is a picture of a goldfish as payment.
4 Js-core @ 2.00 GHz
Slap a liquid cooler and you’re cooking at a high speed 2.08 GHz
We did it!
I love the idea that we could need a dedicated chip to parse web pages 😂
NOOOOOOOO
Modern sites: This page requires a JsPU to run which is not present on this system. The website will run in reduced feature mode.
@Randelung @seaQueue well, i have dedicated JavaScript hardware (https://developer.arm.com/documentation/dui0801/h/A64-Floating-point-Instructions/FJCVTZS)
At this point ARM is a CISC architecture
No, that’s not what RISC is about. There was some early attempts to keep the number of instructions low–originally, ARM didn’t have a multiply instruction, and there’s still a bunch of microcontrollers you can buy that don’t have a divide instruction–but it was quickly abandoned as it’s just not that useful. It only holds back instructions that optimize common cases. Your compiler can implement multiplication by doing addition in a loop, but that’s not very efficient.
What really worked about it was keeping a separation between how memory is accessed. You don’t have an ADD instruction that can fetch from both registers or main memory. You have a MOV instruction that can fetch from memory into a register, and you have an ADD instruction that can work on registers.
ARM still does this just fine.
I’m a computer engineering major (still a student tbf), I’m well aware of the difference between CISC and RISC, I was making a joke.
Also, I understand your point, but you should know though that a load-store architecture and a RISC instruction set are not the same thing. The vast majority of RISC ISAs are load-store, but not all load-store architectures are RISC.
http://www.quadibloc.com/arch/sriscint.htm
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/IZP5KUJprHw?pli=1
Note that none of this has to do with reducing the number of instructions, which is what people tend to think of when they hear the name.
Both ARM and RISC-V have compressed instructions. Dunno how ARM works but with RISC-V the 16-bit instruction set is freely interspersable with the 32 bit one, which also get their alignment reduced to 16 bits. Gets like 95% of the space reduction possible with full variable-width instructions without overcomplicating the insn decoder.
As to addressing and loads and arithmetic: No such instructions, but every CPU but the tiniest ones are expected to do macro-op fusion for things like indexed loads. Here’s an overview.
The MMU thing… well the vector extension can do gather/scatter, I guess it could stay within the letter of “use the MMU once” but definitely not the spirit.
Someone confusing load-store with RISC again.
The R in ARM and RISC is a lie.
The website title says “Arm Developer”, not “ARM Developer”, in a clearly non-acronym way so it’s a guide for making prosthetic hardware. Of course you want a cyborg arm to parse JS natively, why else even get one?
Nope it’s still a register-register op, that’s very much load-store architecture.
It’s reduced, not minimalist, otherwise every RISC CPU out there would only have one instruction like decrement and branch if nonzero. RISC-V would not have an extension mechanism. The instruction exists because it makes things faster because you don’t have to do manual bit-fiddling over 10 instructions to achieve a thing already-existing ALU logic can do in a single cycle. A thing that isn’t even javascript-specific (or terribly relevant to json), it’s a specific float to int cast with specific rounding and overflow mode. Would it more palatable to your tastes if the CPU were to do macro-op fusion on 10(!) instructions to get the same result?
Lie starts with L, dummy
You don’t?
There were XML DOM accelerators for a while. Might still be out there.