[jng]

He is no Jim Keller, and the mostly[1] automated transcript makes it read cringe, but it is not at all devoid of content.

Some examples of very interesting, non-obvious content:

* Even if store ports are kept fixed (2 in his example), adding store address generators (up to 4 in his example) actually improves performance, because it frees up load port dependencies. * Within the same core, they use two different styles of load/address address contention mechanisms which he describes as two tables, one with explicit "allows" and the other one with explicit "denies" -- which of course end up converging (I understand it refers to two different encodings which vary in what is stored). * Between cores, they have completely separate teams which reach different designs for things like this. * It was interesting to me to discover how isolated the different core design teams work (which makes sense) * It was interesting to me to picture the load/store address contention subsystem, which must be quite complex and needs to be really fast.

And I stop listing, re different types of workloads, gaming workloads being similar to DB workloads, and even more similar between them than to SPEC benchmarks and so on.

Just go read the interview if you're interested in CPU design!

[1] mostly automated: at least the dialog name labels seem to be hand-edited, as one of them has a typo

[pixelpoet]

I did the transcription, but not the dialogs and labels etc. So I can say with certainty that it wasn't automated :)

What made the transcription "cringe"? I'd like to believe it's accurate.

[jng]

Oops, sorry about carelessly throwing the "cringe" label at that. Thanks for the transcript which allowed me to enjoy the content, which I did find very interesting.

I haven't watched the video so I am not sure how he actually talks, but what read cringe to me was things like the following paragraph:

"Stephen Robinson: Yeah. So let’s, let’s break it down into address generation versus execution. So, when you have three load execution ports, you need three load address generators. And so that’s there. On the store side, we have four store address generation units. But we only sustain two stores into the data cache."

Which reads weird. "let's" repeated twice, probably a stutter, could be transcribed just once. The "So" or "And so" the interviewee uses all the time at the start of sentences can also be removed for clearer and easier reading most of the time, without loss of meaning. Some sentences can almost be removed completely as they provide no actual information. The previous paragraph could be transcribed like this:

"Stephen Robinson: Let’s break it down into address generation versus execution. When you have three load execution ports, you need three load address generators. That’s there. On the store side, we have four store address generation units. But we only sustain two stores into the data cache."

I hesitate to remove "That's there." so I left it. But everything else I removed, it makes it clearer, and I think I'm not being unfaithful to the original. Removing the duplicate "let's" is a given as it's normal to stutter when speaking, but you don't really want to transcribe that unless the goal is to transcribe the talking imperfections we all have. And all the other things I removed, "Yeah", "So", "And so", are basically the same type of thing.

I thought this was automated because it had so many of the meaningless go-to words and hesitations from the original. Now that you mention it, automated transcription would probably never have produced something this good. And otherwise we are talking about stylistic preference here, always subjective -- although I'd definitely prefer the style of transcription suggest here.

Thanks again. I read chips and cheese with interest, quite often, and enjoy it quite a lot. Keep up the good work. And sorry for the careless put-down.

[brucehoult]

You're right the things you list do contain fresh information. Though the similarity between game logic and business logic is not a new observation ... and web browser in the same ballpark too. I think it's a code size vs data size thing. SPEC programs mostly have a relatively small amount of code, gcc being an obvious exception. And I guess Blender in 2017 FP.