Microarch Club

Latest Episodes:

1000: Ben Titzer May 22, 2024

Ben Titzer joins to talk about the history and future of WebAssembly, the design and implementation of V8's TurboFan optimizing compiler, and the Virgil programming language. We also discuss bringing high-level language features to constrained hardware, the V8 team's response to the Spectre and Meltdown side-channel attacks, and how to design high performance virtual machines.

Ben's Site: https://s3d.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/titzer-ben.html

Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-l-titzer-6b78584/

Ben on Twitter: https://x.com/TitzerBL

Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/1000

111: Kay Li May 08, 2024

Kay Li joins to talk about custom hardware used in high-frequency trading, development workflows for FPGA and ASIC design, and why verification has become a bottleneck in the design process. We also discuss SiLogy, the startup Kay founded with Paul Kim to improve the design workflow, including their experience applying to and going through YCombinator, their initial target market, and how the platform could evolve over time.

Kay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kay-li-84924128b/

Kay on Twitter: https://twitter.com/silikayli

Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/111

110: Rick Altherr Apr 24, 2024

Rick Altherr joins to talk about working on hardware performance analysis tools at Apple during the PowerPC to x86 transition, building flight control software for internet satellites at Google, discovering vulnerabilities in baseboard management controllers, and much more. We also spend an extended portion of the conversation on Rick's current work in quantum computing, including comparing and contrasting with classical computing, and examining some of the challenges of interfacing with these machines today.

Rick's Site: https://www.kc8apf.net/

Rick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxshift/

Rick on Mastodon: https://social.treehouse.systems/@mxshift

Rick on GitHub: https://github.com/mx-shift

Rick's Mentoring Sign-Up: https://calendly.com/mxshift

Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/110

101: Matt Godbolt Apr 10, 2024

Matt Godbolt joins to talk about early microprocessors, working in the games industry, performance optimization on modern x86 CPUs, and the compute infrastructure that powers the financial trading industry. We also discuss Matt's work on bringing YouTube to early mobile phones, and the origin story of Compiler Explorer, Matt's well-known open source project and website.

Matt's Site: https://xania.org/

Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/godbolt/

Matt on X: https://twitter.com/mattgodbolt

Matt on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@mattgodbolt

Matt on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mattgodbolt.bsky.social

Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/101

100: Nathanael Huffman Mar 27, 2024

Nathanael Huffman joins to talk about the magic of FPGAs, the role they play in domains ranging from medical imaging to data centers, and how software development principles can be applied to logic design. We also discuss how Nathanael and the team at Oxide Computer Company built a new rack-scale computer while working remotely, and what exactly happens when it powers on and boots up.

Nathanael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanael-huffman-5128024a/

Nathanael on X: https://twitter.com/SyntheticGate

Nathanael on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@SyntheticGate

Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/100

11: Robert Garner Mar 13, 2024

Robert Garner joins for a fascinating tour of the last 50 years of computing, told through his experiences working alongside pioneers of the industry on projects like the optical mouse, the Xerox STAR workstation, Sun Microsystems’ SPARC instruction set architecture, and many more. We also discuss Robert’s work preserving and restoring systems at the Computer History Museum, and his upcoming book on the technical history of Ethernet.

Robert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertgarner/

Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/

Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/11

10: Thomas Sohmers Feb 28, 2024

Thomas Sohmers joins to discuss dropping out of high school at age 17 to start a chip company, lessons from the successes and failures of past processor architectures, the history of VLIW, and the new AI hardware appliances he and his team are building at Positron AI.

Thomas on X: https://twitter.com/trsohmers

Thomas' Site: https://www.trsohmers.com/

Show Notes

Welcome Thomas Sohmers (00:01:22)
Growing Up Around Computers (00:03:13)
Digging Beneath the Software (00:05:56)
Learning Python, C, and Arduino C (00:07:05)
- https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/
Learning About the Thiel Fellowship (00:07:44)
- https://thielfellowship.org/
Starting Research at MIT at age 14 (00:09:24)
Dropping out of High School and Starting Thiel Fellowship at age 17 (00:10:36)
MIT ISN Lab (00:11:09)
- https://isn.mit.edu/
Evaluating ARM Processors for High Performance Computing (00:11:28)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family
ARM Calxeda Processor (00:11:38)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calxeda
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-the-death-of-calxeda-means-for-the-future-of-microservers/
Scaling Out Low Power Processors for Data Center Compute (00:12:27)
Incorporating REX Computing (00:13:42)
- http://rexcomputing.com/
- https://fortune.com/2015/07/21/rex-computing/
Facebook and the Open Compute Project (00:14:18)
- https://www.opencompute.org/
Deciding Against Arm (00:14:49)
ARMv8 (00:15:12)
- https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm/armv8
Deciding to Design a New Architecture (00:16:26)
Multiflow (00:18:23)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiflow
Good Architecture Ideas from the Past (00:18:35)
Thomas' Talk at Stanford (00:18:59)
- https://youtu.be/ki6jVXZM2XU
RISC vs. CISC Debate (00:19:37)
- https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/risc/risccisc/
SPARC Instruction Set (00:20:04)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC
The Importance of History (00:20:58)
RISC Came Before CISC (00:23:08)
CDC 6600 (00:23:20)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600
Load-Store Architecture (00:23:53)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load–store_architecture
IBM System/360 (00:24:02)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360
PowerPC (00:24:29)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
VLIW (00:25:02)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_long_instruction_word
ELI-512 and Josh Fisher (00:25:05)
- https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800046.801649
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Fisher
Floating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS) (00:26:45)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_Point_Systems
Multiflow Compiler (00:26:52)
- https://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdf
Instruction Level Parallelism (00:27:33)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction-level_parallelism
Intel Itanium (00:28:20)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium
Itanium is not a VLIW Architecture (00:29:04)
Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computer (EPIC) (00:29:22)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computing
x86 and Pentium (00:30:18)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium
Impact of Branch Prediction and Caching on Determinism (00:31:34)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_cache
Why Itanium Failed (00:32:27)
REX's NEO Architecture (00:35:29)
- http://rexcomputing.com/#neoarch
Hard Real-Time Determinism (00:35:41)
Scratchpad Memory (00:35:54)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratchpad_memory
Removing Memory Management (TLB, MMU, etc.) (00:36:18)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_lookaside_buffer
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_unit
ALU, FPU, and Register Files (00:37:14)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_logic_unit
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_unit
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_file
Benefits of Removing Implicit Caching Layers (00:38:30)
VLIW in Signal Processing (00:39:51)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor
VLIW Won in a Silent Way (00:40:49)
Original Reason for Hardware-Managed Caching (00:41:26)
Impact of VLIW and Software-Managed Memory on Compile Times (00:42:41)
- http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/aries/Documents/vliw.pdf
LLVM and Sufficiently Advanced Open Source Compilers (00:42:49)
- https://llvm.org/
Apple Transition from PowerPC to x86 to Arm (00:43:31)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

1: Philip Freidin Feb 14, 2024

Philip Freidin joins to talk about developing a passion for electronics and computer architecture while growing up in Australia, getting started on the PDP-8, his grand plan to work on AMD bit-slice processors, and plenty more.

Philip on X: https://twitter.com/PhilipFreidin

Philip’s Site: http://www.fliptronics.com/

Show Notes