Computer Science·February 12, 2025
ARM vs x86: The Philosophy of Architecture
Why does MacBook battery last long? Should I use AWS Graviton? A deep dive into the philosophy of CISC (Complex) vs RISC (Simple) architectures.
#cs#hardware#cpu#arm
Writing about development and technology.
Why does MacBook battery last long? Should I use AWS Graviton? A deep dive into the philosophy of CISC (Complex) vs RISC (Simple) architectures.
When the CPU is 100% busy and you move the mouse, does it respond? Polling vs Interrupts explained.
Why 32-bit OS is capped at 4GB RAM. The role of Address, Data, and Control Buses. How PCIe lanes affect your RTX 4090 performance. Von Neumann Bottleneck explained.
How do you run a 10GB game with only 8GB of RAM? The OS secretly uses part of your hard drive.
Bought a fast SSD but it's still slow? One-lane country road (SATA) vs 16-lane highway (NVMe).
LP records vs USB drives. Why physically spinning disks are inherently slow, and how SSDs made servers 100x faster.
Does 8 cores mean 8x faster? From Amdahl's Law to concurrency vs parallelism, hyper-threading, and why Chrome eats so much RAM.
Why did AI and deep learning abandon CPUs for GPUs? From ALU architecture to CUDA memory hierarchy and generative AI principles.
90% of CPU performance is determined by cache. From data locality and MESI protocol to cache mapping, TLB, branch prediction, and NUMA.
From DRAM leakage currents to ECC, HBM, and real benchmarks (fio, sysbench). A developer's guide going beyond simple analogies.
Don't be fooled by spec sheet numbers. The real secret of CPU performance isn't how fast it ticks, but how much work it does per tick.
Do you Wash-Dry-Fold sequentially or overlap them? The secret to CPU performance boost.
How the CPU breathes. This 3-step rhythm repeated billions of times a second is the computer's life.
A CPU is actually a giant factory. Inside, there are Managers, Workers, and Workbenches.
Current flows = 1, Stoops = 0. But how does it remember info? The birth of 1-bit memory.
How do we add numbers with logic gates? Designing the magical circuit where 1+1=2.
How do computers make decisions? Even complex AI is just a combination of these 4 gates.
Why do color codes (#FFFFFF) mix letters and numbers? The greatest gift Hexadecimal gives developers is 'Readability'.
Pringles can (Stack) vs Restaurant line (Queue). The most basic data structures, but without them, you can't understand recursion or message queues.
Why do we need bitwise operations? From parity checks to permission management, algorithm optimization, and the legendary 'Fast Inverse Square Root'. A deep dive into bit manipulation.
