Towards Predictable Performance for Interactive Workloads
… today it is hard for software developers to drill down to determine the root causes of performance fluctuations.
A Follow-up to “The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Machine Learning in Computer Systems Research”
I am grateful to everyone who responded to my post in April that asked why machine learning has had limited impact on computer systems research. In addition to commenting on this website and sending me email, people discussed this question at length on reddit and...
A Decade of Mobile Computing
The smartphone is the most pervasive mobile computing device on the planet. There are over 2.1 billion devices worldwide, and this number is rising sharply as smartphone penetration increases in emerging markets like China and India. By 2020, there will be 6 billion...
A Vision of Persistence
For decades, memory systems have relied on DRAM for capacity, SRAMs for speed and then turned programmers loose with malloc(), free(), and pthreads to build an amazing array of useful, carefully tuned, composable, and remarkably useful data structures. However, these...
Thoughts on ISCA44
The 44th ISCA just wrapped up. This year it was held in Toronto, which proved to be a great location owning in no small part to great local organizing and participation. I find attending ISCA to be the best way to quickly read the pulse of the broader Computer...
Freedom vs. Security in Computer Systems
Is it time to consider designing and operating computer systems with an “off-by-default” attitude to proactively defend against such attacks?
Democratizing Design for Future Computing Platforms
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has been working hard on various white papers over the past couple of months and slowly releasing them. You can see all of them here. Today, we highlight one paper in particular, called Democratizing Design for Future Computing...
Die Stacking is Happening
(This blog is written to celebrate the two-year anniversary for the worlds’ first commercial processor with die-stacking technology, which was released on 6/16/2015, as AMD Fury X GPU) Many of you who attended MICRO 2013 may still remember the keynote speech...
If You Build It, Will They Come?
All hardware companies face a conundrum. Should they build a riskier product that has a higher probability of failure, or should they continue the evolutionary trend of their current products? The safe thing to do, and one that many customers may ask for, is the...
HARDWARE 0-DAYS: PUBLISH, SELL OR HOARD? (PART IV)
What should vendors do when they discover that a hardware 0-day has been used to exploit systems built on their product? Some vulnerabilities may permit vendors to patch the vulnerability using microcode updates. For instance, a mitigation for the row hammer DRAM...Subscribe
