Background Heat on chip Computer chips become hotter when they are used. If they become too hot, they break. Also, if they become just a little hot enough, they consume much more power to get the same amount of work done. Therefore, to protect chips and increase their power efficiency …| dr knz @ work
Ever since I defended my thesis in September 2012, a thought had been left lingering in the epilogue of my book: that computing systems architects and designers are currently incentivized by market effects to build mostly “closed” systems that are annoying to tinker with. Besides a few exceptions like Raspberry …| dr knz @ work
Ivan Godard from Out-of-the-Box Computing is currently touring the US talking about his Mill CPU architecture, based on a new machine model called the “Belt”. I just finished watching the 2nd talk on the machine model and its realization in the processor’s micro-architecture. OotB’s contribution is a machine …| dr knz @ work
This week, I collaborated with my friend Martin at Daiteq to add a feature to the UT-LEON3 processor and support it in our variant of the C language called SL. In short, we extended the processors’ thread creation protocol to support a wider variety of synchronization modes, and created …| dr knz @ work
Ever since 2010, I have studied the “meta” of software, by studying (and thinking about) the continued dialogue between programming language designers, computer designers, and programmers. The following constitutes a snapshot of my current thinking. Epistemological context During the period 2008-2012, I was requested to help design&build programming tools …| dr knz @ work
