The term “gonzo journalism” gets thrown around pretty loosely, generally referring to stuff that’s kind of shouty or over-the-top, but really gonzo stuff is completely, totally bananas. Case in point is James Mickens’s The Slow Winter [PDF], a wonderfully lunatic account of the limitations of chip-design that will almost certainly delight you as much as it did me.
I think that it used to be fun to be a hardware architect. Anything that you invented would
be amazing, and the laws of physics were actively trying to help you succeed. Your friend
would say, “I wish that we could predict branches more accurately,” and you’d think,
“maybe we can leverage three bits of state per branch to implement a simple saturating
counter,” and you’d laugh and declare that such a stupid scheme would never work, but then
you’d test it and it would be 94% accurate, and the branches would wake up the next morn-
ing and read their newspapers and the headlines would say OUR WORLD HAS BEEN
SET ON FIRE. You’d give your buddy a high-five and go celebrate at the bar, and then you’d
think, “I wonder if we can make branch predictors even more accurate,” and the next day
you’d start XOR’ing the branch’s PC address with a shift register containing the branch’s
recent branching history, because in those days, you could XOR anything with anything
and get something useful, and you test the new branch predictor, and now you’re up to
96% accuracy, and the branches call you on the phone and say OK, WE GET IT, YOU DO
NOT LIKE BRANCHES, but the phone call goes to your voicemail because you’re too busy
driving the speed boats and wearing the monocles that you purchased after your promotion
at work. You go to work hung-over, and you realize that, during a drunken conference call,
you told your boss that your processor has 32 registers when it only has 8, but then you realize
THAT YOU CAN TOTALLY LIE ABOUT THE NUMBER OF PHYSICAL REGISTERS,
and you invent a crazy hardware mapping scheme from virtual registers to physical ones,
and at this point, you start seducing the spouses of the compiler team, because it’s pretty
clear that compilers are a thing of the past, and the next generation of processors will run
English-level pseudocode directly. Of course, pride precedes the fall, and at some point,
you realize that to implement aggressive out-of-order execution, you need to fit more
transistors into the same die size, but then a material science guy pops out of a birthday
cake and says YEAH WE CAN DO THAT, and by now, you’re
touring with Aerosmith and throwing Matisse paintings from
hotel room windows, because when you order two Matisse
paintings from room service and you get three, that equation
is going to be balanced. It all goes so well, and the party keeps
getting better. When you retire in 2003, your face is wrinkled
from all of the smiles, and even though you’ve been sued by sev-
eral pedestrians who suddenly acquired rare paintings as hats,
you go out on top, the master of your domain. You look at your son
John, who just joined Intel, and you rest well at night, knowing
that he can look forward to a pliant universe and an easy life.
The Slow Winter [James Mickens/Usenix]
(via JWZ)
(Image: MYK78 Clipper Chip Lowres, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from travisgoodspeed’s photostream)