… multi-GHz superscalar quad-core processors can execute approximately 100 million instructions per Joule, assuming all cores are active and avoid stalls or mispredictions. Lower-frequency in-order CPUs, in contrast, can provide over 1 billion instructions per Joule—an order of magnitude more
sequential and combinational state machines
There’s a correspondence between the notions of “combinational” and “sequential” in digital circuit engineering and some structure in state machines (and therefore monoids) that seems interesting. In digital logic, a “combinational” circuit like a logic gate has can be associated
Linux descends into priority inheritance hell
The PI chain walk is implemented by the function rt_mutex_adjust_prio_chain. The implementation has gone through several iterations, and has ended up with what we believe is the best. It walks the PI chain by only grabbing at most two locks
State machines and circuits
The cross coupled latch is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century State machine models of timing and circuit design
Public spirit of programmers
It’s sad to note that while Doctors/engineers/journalists/even-lawyers without borders are all organizations of people who help less developed nations, “programmers/software/etc” without borders refers to outsourcing.
Fake Steve Jobs: “Then I hung up”
I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you
Recursive transducers and products – pre-submit version
Recursive transducers.
Software Design and time synchronization
I have a blog post up at fsmlabs.com about our TimeKeeper software for time synchronization. TimeKeeper is currently aimed at financial trading markets, but we also hope to market it to electric power distribution and transmission engineers who have a
Montavista thoughts
Bill “Linux Pundit” Weinberg explains: Business Model and Execution: Many MontaVista watchers have argued that the company’s business model was essentially flawed. […] Such a model based on building with and for open source can devolve into less attractive high-overhead
Process Algebra and classical automata
The long awaited process algebra paper is now finally available in PDF Reducing Process Algebra.