2004 me and my friends: "I don't want all my public information online."
GenZ; publishes every possible detail on TikTok.
In 20 years we've done a cultural 180 on privacy.
I bet in 20 years Gen5 (three generations from now?) will be fine with AI agents running their lives.
Meanwhile I'll be 80 and still not on social media, just message boards like HN. Using new frequent accounts and changing my wirting style to defeat stylometrics (sorry dang).
> GenZ; publishes every possible detail on TikTok. In 20 years we've done a cultural 180 on privacy.
the results of that has only proved you were right. I'll go on record now that the people who don't want corporate controlled AI in their personal lives today are also going to be proven right when the next generation of suckers comes along and gives up what they had because a corporation told them too.
Max-performance chips even introduce dead dummy transistors ("dark silicon") to provide a bit of heat sinking capability. Having transistors that are sometimes-but-rarely useful is no problem whatsoever for modern processes.
AFAIK the dark silicon term is specifically those transistors not always powered on. Doping the Si substrate to turn it into transistors is not going to change the heat profile, so I don't think dummy transistors are added on purpose for heat management. Happy to be proven wrong though.
My understanding is that pretty much every possible combination of these things is found somewhere in a modern chip. There are dummy transistors, dark transistors, slow transistors... everything. Somewhere.
I was an instruction fetch unit (IFU) architect on P6 from 1992-1995. And yes, it was a pain, and we had close to 100x the test vectors of all the other units, going back to the mid 1980's. Once we started going bonkers with the prefixes, we just left the pre-Pentium decoder alone and added new functional blocks to handle those. And it wasn't just branch prediction that sucked, like you called out! Filling the instruction cache was a nightmare, keeping track of head and tail markers, coalescing, rebuilding, ... lots of parallel decoding to deal with cache and branch-prediction improvements to meet timing as the P6 core evolved was the typical solution. We were the only block (well, minus IO) that had to deal with legacy compatibility. Fortunately I moved on after the launch of Pentium II and thankfully did not have to deal with Pentium4/Northwood.
Well duh, the IFU. :) No, I was fond of the FPU because the math was just so bonkers. The way division was performed with complete disregard to the rules taught to gradeschoolers always fascinated me. Bob Colwell told us that P6 was the last architecture one person could understand completely.
Tooling & Languages: IHDL, a templating layer on top of HDL that had a preprocessor for intel-specific macros. DART test template generator for validation coverage vectors. The entire system was stitched together with PERL, TCL, and shellscripts, and it all ran on three OSes: AIX, HPUX and SunOS. (I had a B&W sparcstation and was jealous of the 8514/a 1024x768 monitors on AIX.) We didn't go full Linux until Itanic and by then we were using remote computing via Exceed and gave up our workstations for generic PCs. When I left in the mid 2000's, not much had changed in the glue/automation languages, except a little less Tcl. I'm blanking on the specific formal verification tool, I think it was something by Cadence. Synthesis and timing was ... design compiler and primetime? Man. Cobwebs. When I left we were 100% Cadence and Synopsys and Verilog (minus a few custom analog tools based on SPICE for creating our SSAs). That migration happened during Bonnell, but gahd it was painful. Especially migrating all the Pentium/486/386/286/8088 test vectors.
I have no idea what it is like ~20 years later (gasp), but I bet the test vectors live on, like Henrietta Lacks' cells. I'd be interested to hear from any Intelfolk reading this?
Funny and depressing that the AMD/Intel culture war still exists. I remember arguing about it in 1990. Their marketing departments severely brainwashed generations of nerds.
I'm really surprised 286-based machines were still $1600 in 1991. But it was a brand name and not a frankenclone assembled from the back of computer shopper.
GenZ; publishes every possible detail on TikTok.
In 20 years we've done a cultural 180 on privacy.
I bet in 20 years Gen5 (three generations from now?) will be fine with AI agents running their lives.
Meanwhile I'll be 80 and still not on social media, just message boards like HN. Using new frequent accounts and changing my wirting style to defeat stylometrics (sorry dang).