Episode #125 of the Stack Overflow podcast is here. We talk Tilde Club and mechanical keyboards. Listen now

# Tag Info

38

Your suspicion is correct. The CPU doesn't care about the semantics of your data. Sometimes, though, it does make a difference. For example, some arithmetic operations produce different results when the arguments are semantically signed or unsigned. In that case you need to tell the CPU which interpretation you intended. It is up to the programmer to make ...

24

Sure. In principle, given appropriate hardware, you could have just a disk, with everything stored on disk. Any time the CPU did a load or store instruction, there could be some hardware that turns that into a disk read or write. It'd be extremely slow: on a magnetic disk, each seek takes about 10ms, so you could do about 100 random-access reads and ...

16

In terms of computability, it is known that every modern day computer can be simulated by a Turing Machine whose only storage is a single, linear tape cells that can be written. Assuming you can keep adding unlimited amounts of disk storage, a computer having only hard drives is just as powerful. So certainly you could make a computer without memory. Of ...

15

It's actually not that hard to design an operating system that doesn't require an MMU. There are a few conveniences you'll have to do without, but nothing insurmountable. Since different tasks will have to be loaded at different addresses, all your code (except for the kernel, the standard library, and any other code that's part of your base runtime ...

14

As others have already answered, today's common CPUs do not know what a given memory position contains; the software decides. However, there are other possibilities. Lisp Machines for example used a tagged architecture which stored the type of each memory position; that way the hardware itself could do some of the work of high-level languages. And even now,...

14

The question is not purely academic. It is a matter of historical record that one of the earliest commercially-produced computers [sorry, I don't recall which offhand] did not have any RAM - all programs were executed by fetching instructions directly off of a magnetic drum [a rotating cylinder with outer surface magnetizable (disks came later)]. It was ...

10

Oblivious RAM is an interface between a program and the physical RAM that when you perform a read or write, does both at the same time on the physical RAM to hide if you are reading or writing. Plus, it shuffles the memory from time to time so that an adversary seeing only accesses to the physical RAM cannot know whetever you accessed the same data twice or ...

9

Forget for a moment all of the issues related to the access to main memory and level 3 cache. From a parallel perspective, ignoring these issues, the program parallelize perfectly when using $p$ processors (or cores), owing to the fact that, once you partition the work to be done through domain decomposition, each core must process either $\left\lfloor {\... 9 No, and not by a long way. Take 25,000,000 ordinary desktop PCs from 2004. To exceed the supercomputer you're talking about, each would need an 88megaflop CPU, 40Mb of memory and a 940Mb hard disk. In 2004, CPU clock frequencies were already in the GHz range, RAM in the hundreds of megabytes and hard drives in the gigabyte range. And there were many more ... 7 When you read data from a given memory address, the memory manager checks if there is a copy in the cache. If yes (cache hit), the copy is read into the register. If no (cache miss), the cache is first updated with a row of memory from RAM; then the data can be read into the register. Conversely, when you write to a memory address, the data is just written ... 7 The 8080, as @TEMLIB pointed out, had 16 bit registers (the program counter, the stack pointer and BC, DE, and HL), and could access 216 bytes of memory. The 8080 had an 8-bit bus, and for instructions that required 2 bytes of data or address the bus would be used for 2 cycles. The 8086 is more interesting. The 8086 had 16 bit registers, but could access ... 7 No. Disk drives are not Random Addressable like RAM. Instead they're block storage devices. You can't read or write a byte from them. And your CPU cannot read a whole sector at once, they need that random access. Operating systems hide this level of detail from you, but they do so by reading a whole sctor into RAM, modifying it, and writing it back. As a ... 6 Computers don't use the hexadecimal number system for assembly language. Assembly language, or rather machine code, uses base 256 (typically): instructions are encoded in units of bytes. When displaying machine code, it is customary to use octal or hexadecimal. The reason is that in many cases, the byte is further subdivided into bitstrings, and identifying ... 6 I'm not entirely sure if I understood the question the way it was intended, but what computers do is that they operate on electricity, so they don't have two discrete logical values$0$and$1$per se. What they do have is electricity with voltage, and they are made to operate as if there were two logical values$0$and$1$if the voltage at a gate is below ... 6 The DMA engine doesn't grab the bus for the duration of the whole transfer, only while specific data is being transferred. Yes, that means CPU acces to memory is hampered, but not shut off completely. The CPU can also work with data from its cache in the meantime. 6 x86 is a 32-bit processor. Memory addresses for x86 are 32 bits. Each byte has a different address, so a 32-bit address means that you can only address up to$2^{32}$bytes of memory.$2^{32}\$ bytes is 4GB. That's why 32-bit processors are limited to 4GB of memory (per application). In particular, each application can use only 4GB of memory. (...

6

Somewhere which is not part of the user accessible memory (i.e. not in the main memory nor in the cache -- that would be too slow, one of the main use of OOO is to hide part of the latency of main memory and low level caches). Probably in register files inside the processor or possibly in the same kind of memory cells used for L1 caches (but not in the L1 ...

6

Cache lines are evicted : When the OS requests it, it may occur for example in non cache-coherent systems when a peripheral does a DMA transfer (direct transfer from a peripheral to main memory), or if the CPU is shut down to save its state to RAM... When all the ways of the cache are already used for the requested line. In a write-through cache, new data ...

6

RAID 2 doesn't use parity: it uses a Hamming code. This allows error correction as well as error detection. Remember that a parity bit is just a bit that tells you whether the sum of the other bits is odd or even. It wouldn't make sense to have more than one of those because they'd all be telling you the same thing. If you're using RAID 3 with four data ...

6

Free space is a concept at the level of the filesystem, which is part of the operating system. It is up to the filesystem to determine what space is free, and how to exploit it. Data is stored on the hard drive in a structured way. The filesystem divides the drive into sectors (basic units, usually 512, 1024, 2048, or 4096 bytes), and maintains data ...

5

See EEPROM#Related_types on Wikipedia. Your Program Memory is likely flash memory, which you'll flash (i.e. completely erase and rewrite) with your program every time you like to change it. 8KB is smaller than the usual size of blocks for flash memory, so its unlikely that you can erase only a half or a quarter of your Program Memory. The program itself ...

5

I decided to try out __builtin_prefetch() myself. I'm posting it here as answer in case others want to test it on their machines. The results are close to what Jukka describes: About a 20% decrease in running time when prefetching 20 elements ahead versus prefetching 0 elements ahead. Results: prefetch = 0, time = 1.58000 prefetch = 1, time = 1.47000 ...

5

This is a very broad question which would be far easier to answer in person with a whiteboard than in a short online missive. I found this document for the design of a simple computer from Purdue (part of an engineering program assignment). The document shows the design of an 8 bit computer that would be far simpler to explain than your average CPU of ...

5

Byte operations will always be important because a lot of a modern workload involves bytes. Text processing and bytecode interpretation (including emulation of other CPUs) are obvious examples, but also device drivers often need to be able to manipulate bytes efficiently. Byte-addressed memory can be emulated with word-addressed memory and a reasonable ...

4

DDR3 access is indeed pipelined. http://www.eng.utah.edu/~cs7810/pres/dram-cs7810-protocolx2.pdf slides 20 and 24 show what happens in the memory bus during pipelined read operations. (partially wrong, see below) Multiple threads are not necessary if the CPU architecture supports cache prefetch. Modern x86 and ARM as well as many other architectures have an ...

4

Cache memory levels are inherently a "subdivision" of main memory (RAM). To speed up the access of RAM, the cache was created using the notion of "The Principle of Locality". Frequently in programs, memory is accessed in locations that are close (local) to previously accessed locations, so it benefits to keep sections of data stored in nearby cache instead ...

4

I suggest you start by reading about reversible computing. In principle, if we could make sure that all of our computations were reversible, we could circumvent that physical limit. In principle, all computations can be made reversible by keeping track of extra information about the inputs or the states the computation went through. In practice, there's a ...

4

From my understanding(correct me if I am wrong) when I read data from RAM memory it is copied into processor cache and than it is copied into register to be used by the processor. That is generally correct. Just be sure you understand that we're talking about reading data that happens to be in RAM. We're not talking about issuing an instruction to read data ...

4

Looking at slide 5-43 "Data Path Revisited" these are MUX, multiplexors. As such they are a "switch": When the red input is 1, we have immediate mode and the SEXT output is passed through unchanged. When it is 0 it needs to look up a value based on the SEXT value and some memory or register. Also in the slides, a MUX is represented again at BR and JMP, ...

4

Deleting is not necessarily destroying data. It can be done (much faster, indeed) by making it inaccessible. You can do it by erasing critical information from the data structures that are used to index the data you want to delete. How exactly this is done depends on how the storage device is organized (formatted).

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible