We're talking about the same site that constantly has submissions from politically biased sources alluding to various ways that the orange man is bad, where comments pushing standard right-wing talking points are frequently flagged and killed within minutes, and a recent Ask HN seriously entertained the question of whether HN is "fascist" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598731) because the "orange man is bad" posts get flagged?
Not fair. Its not right wing or any wing. I think the decent thing to do is not speak ill of the dead. I didnt like him, I barely took notice of what he did. He was not on any side just on the side of opportunity. But there is no solution to be found in violence.
My solution is that I no longer contribute to the public internet in any meaningful way. No more open source projects. No more contributions to free software. Bug reports only when it helps me. The hacker ethos is dead. Selfishness and greed won.
Silicon Valley builds empires off the back of free intellectual labor. I'm done with all of it. If they want something from me they can (and do) pay for it.
I don't know of any CPU that speculates both sides of a branch. I work on a CPU design team.
Modern CPUs speculate hundreds of instructions ahead, and with just a dozen branches you can have a few thousand different paths. It makes more sense to speculate down one path with very high accuracy.
I think a lot of folks get mixed up with GPU and/or SIMD architecture, where you execute both sides of the branch out of necessity: Some of the lanes need to go one way and some the other, so you have to do both.
Software table walk performance is bad on modern out of order processors because it has to finish every older instruction in flight and redirect the front end to the exception vector. This can take several hundred cycles. Hardware table walk can take <20 cycles to hit in the next level cache.
As a professional EE, I know that ARM Cortex-M4 is not a chip. It's an embedded processor that is put into an SOC (which is a chip), such as the STM32-family from ST.
Having read it at the time and now again I'd be surprised if Apple would do any better in his performance metrics. Big companies are, almost by definition, slow. The breakneck speed he wants to see will never happen in a company with thousands of people, thousands of opinions and many layers of management.
So, while that is a sad reminder that things could be far better in theory, I don't see how it supports that Meta couldn't produce a Vision Pro if they wanted to.
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