Architecture Columns
It’s time for me to start contributing back to this Blogosphere thing. I should also get some practice in technical writing and commentary, and the kinds of critical thinking they encourage. Finally, I should do something to show anyone who finds this site what I’m like professionally, not just personally.
To that end, I’ve started writing a series of articles (really, they’re more like columns) on computer architecture, my area of focus and primary interest.
So far, there are 1 posts. feed
- May 19th, 2008 — Thoughts on the Atom
Intel’s new Atom microarchitecture targets embedded systems, bringing two new innovations to embedded ISAs: SMT and x86 binary compatibility. SMT will bring better performance on multithreaded workloads, but the Atom’s heavy front end may consume too much power on simple monothreaded code. I don’t think x86 compatibility is a particularly desirable property of an embedded system, though: nobody cares about binary compatibility back to MS-DOS, and the x86 community may not be ready for the board support issues of the embedded world.