instruction scheduling

A family comedy video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a parent follows them with exact literalness, producing chaos. This is the classroom-friendly version.

Christopher Domas presents at Black Hat 2017 how page fault analysis and processor fuzzing can exhaustively search the x86 instruction set. The talk uncovers undocumented instructions and hardware bugs and shows limits of disassemblers.

A family video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a parent follows them exactly as written, with comic results. It demonstrates how precise instructions must be.

Harvard physicist Eric Mazur explains how he realized his students were memorizing rather than understanding, and how he changed his teaching. He presents peer instruction and data showing improved student performance.

A long Mill Computing lecture on the Mill CPU's compiler toolchain, covering the specializer that targets family members, scheduling and latency passes, and the belt. It explains how the compiler handles a wide-issue, exposed-pipeline design.

Christopher Domas presents research at DEF CON 26 showing a hidden alternate instruction set and undocumented hardware backdoor in some x86 processors, found on a third-party CPU. He uses it to ask how feasible wider hardware backdoors are.

A roughly 45-minute vintage US military instructional film that gives a comprehensive overview of celestial navigation, covering sextant use and the theory behind lines of position.

CGP Grey argues that the two-day weekend is poorly structured and proposes taking days off midweek, such as Wednesday and Sunday, instead.

The second talk in the Mill CPU series by Mill Computing, covering the Belt, the Mill's operand-passing model that replaces general registers. It explains the cost of register renaming in conventional wide CPUs and how the Belt reaches high instruction-level parallelism.

A short, deadpan Sony instructional video from E3 2013 showing how to 'share' a PS4 game by physically handing the disc to a friend. It was Sony's jab at Microsoft's planned restrictions on used games and game sharing for the Xbox One.

A 1953 US Navy training film on the basic mechanisms in fire control computers: shafts, gears, cams and differentials. It shows how these mechanical parts compute ship and target firing solutions.

Paul Turner of Google presents kernel interfaces for user-level scheduling of real threads, aiming at a uniform synchronous programming model across C++, Java, Go and Python. It introduces the switchto-style system calls behind Google's fibers.

Andrew Adams, a Halide developer, presents the Halide language for image processing and tensor computation. The talk explains the separation of algorithm from schedule with illustrated examples of parallelism, locality and redundancy tradeoffs.

Kiran Pamnany's Cambridge Julia Meetup talk on Julia's shared memory parallelism and its new task scheduler. It argues that fork-join and work-stealing models nest poorly and presents depth-first scheduling for composable parallelism.

Chris Celio of UC Berkeley compares the RISC-V, ARM and x86 instruction sets, with quantitative data on instruction counts and code density. It examines how the compressed extension fares against Thumb and x86.

CGP Grey explains the mess of Daylight Saving Time, including its dubious energy savings and the odd cases like Arizona that opt out. It is a short, simple explainer.

A 2018 vlog showing how to use the windshield wipers on a Tesla Model 3, including auto mode, manual settings and voice commands. It is labeled outdated.

Casey Muratori's long talk arguing that modern software has ballooned to tens of millions of lines because of hardware and OS diversity. He proposes a stable ISA for entire system-on-a-chip packages and recalls when games shipped with their own boot disk.

Felienne Hermans's Strange Loop keynote on the history and pedagogy of teaching programming. She questions exploration-only approaches like Logo and discusses research supporting explicit instruction and rote practice.

Bassist Victor Wooten argues that music should be learned the way children learn their first language: by immersion and play, without early correction or rigid academic instruction. He draws on how babies pick up speech from the people around them.

Go runtime contributor Dmitry Vyukov looks inside the Go scheduler, explaining how goroutines and channels are implemented. He covers the main scheduler components and overall operation, then goes into details such as preemption and stacks.

A 1940 Bell Telephone educational short teaching customers how to use their new dial phones and why the change was happening. It is a period piece about rolling out a new technology to ordinary people.

Lex Fridman interviews legendary chip architect Jim Keller about Moore's Law, microprocessor design, and first-principles thinking. Keller draws on his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, discussing instruction sets, transistor budgets, and self-driving.

Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.

A 1930s Chevrolet training film explaining the principles and development of the differential gear. It builds the idea step by step from first principles to the finished mechanism.

A 1936 Chevrolet-sponsored film that explains how a car transmission works by treating gears as spinning levers. It uses physical models to make the mechanism clear.

Bisqwit writes a NES emulator in C++ in about 15 minutes of tool-assisted, sped-up coding, narrated with captions. It shows an accurate emulator built with a compile-time generated 6502 instruction table. Part 2 covers compiling and running it.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS107 Programming Paradigms, taught by Jerry Cain, giving an overview of the course. The course goes from C and assembly through C++, concurrency, Scheme and Python.

Lin Clark gives an illustrated, cartoon-style walkthrough of React Fiber, the rewrite of React's reconciler, explaining its incremental rendering and scheduling at React Conf 2017.

Hennessy and Patterson's 2018 Turing Award lecture at ISCA, A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture. It covers domain-specific hardware, security, open instruction sets and agile chip development.

Matt Godbolt, creator of Compiler Explorer, tours surprising optimizations modern compilers perform, such as turning loops into closed-form sums and using popcount instructions. He explores what the compiler does behind the scenes.

Dr. Mark Cucuzzella of the Natural Running Center gives a short instructional video on natural running form. It describes the principles of good technique, including barefoot-style mechanics.

CGP Grey argues that a classroom works well only for the one student pitched at the average level, and sketches a future of personalized instruction. It introduces the idea of a Digital Aristotle, a tutor for every learner.

A 1970 demonstration of W. Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, teaching a complete beginner to play tennis in about ten minutes. He chats with her, feeds balls and gives positive feedback instead of instruction.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, discusses the future of microprocessors, including the economics of scaling below 28nm and why much of a chip must stay powered off.

Bill Dally of NVIDIA gives a University of Washington lecture on trends in deep learning hardware. It covers numeric formats, specialized instructions, energy per operation and co-design of hardware and software.

Vox's Joe Posner, with help from 99% Invisible, explains why bad doors are everywhere. It covers Don Norman's long-running complaint about doors and the idea that good design should not need instructions.

John McCutchan of Google explains how Dart and the Dart VM expose SIMD instructions to speed up web software. He covers what SIMD is and how it applies to graphics and games.