The micro architecture is dead, nobody could guess how long Intel and AMD still could screw out additional 10% a year from their cores. It is a time a major change both in software and hardware. The ideas already floating around and exists almost in every paper in one form or another: clustering and composite cores, transactional memory, special purpose accelerators … and binary translation as a magic solution for all the problems. Dynamic binary translation was mentioned almost in every paper, even touched some transactional memory papers. I personally believe that new microarchitecture going burn in a just few years from now and it will include hardware or software binary translator onboard.
A few special words about the talk by Weiwi Hu, ICT - "Research and development of Gudson Microprocessor". It turned out the Gudson, a Chinese home made processor, completely architected and designed by team of around a 100 people, when great are students of ICT (Institute of Computing Technology in Chinese Academy of Sciences). In single slide Hu summarized the whole work of the micro-architect in details and main deference of architects from design teams. I loved it !
Organization was very impressive, the ability of organization committee to make a banquet in Great Hall of People Beijing already shows everything. The excursion to the Great Wall today was very impressive as well. The camera I bought working perfect, I'll try to make and post some fine grained selection of the pictures on my Zenfolio tomorrow.
You are welcome to post your comments to the all above or/and e-mail me your tricks and tips for my following trip. I use my iPodTouch everywhere here so I stay connected to the Gmail and could read your mails and even answer.
Ha, isn't I sound like an Apple fan ?
Actually I probably already is or would become soon, after will find where to buy iPhone2 :)
Climbing the Great Wall
Coming next:
Beijing - to be continued (Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Silk Market, Beijing architecture)
Xian
Kunming
Lijiang
Guiling
Hong-Kong and Macao
21.06.2008. Yesterday I finally met with Darek, it is a day before a conference so we planned to play a tourists and walk through the Forbidden City. We were walking down from the subway station and I was playing with my Sony DSC-H3 camera trying to figure out why most of the pictures I take look out focus. After hardware reset pictures still OK but it is enough to zoom in to any object to get all the following images crappy out of focus again.
I am in China, with so many pictures to take and
I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA !
Even there is no reason to go to the Forbidden City!
So we actually cancelled the Forbidden City and went to the Darek's place to prepare for ISCA presentation. And did a very right thing, we had fixed a few slides, run other the presentation again and tested a Bochs side-by-side demo video in the battle-field conditions.
The presentation went just excellent, we probably easily could compete for the title of best presenters of the workshop !
After the lunch we skipped the second part of the day and went to the Beijing Hai Dan Market. A huge electronic market, at least four huge 10 floor towers fully packed by every electronic stuff you could just imagine. Everything you ever saw or heard about could be found here. Darek was looking for newest ASUS EEE PC laptop with large screen resolution and we actually found it at end of the day for the initial price of around $450. The prices probably relatively cheap for Israel but still expensive for the US dollar and especially for tax free Oregon.
Hai Dan Market - second tower, third floor
I end up buying 10Mp Sony DSC-W170 camera with complete kit (battery, cables, charger and Chinese manuals) + 2G Sony memory stick for about 1100 NIS. Not that cheap, but also not such expensive. Could not tell anything bad about the camera till now, let's hope it will survive for the next three weeks !
Bochs 2.3.7 running latest Menuet64 image
Bochs 2.3.7 is a result of research and optimization work done in past year on Bochs sources. The changes made were so significant that no CPU method left untouched. Almost whole Bochs CPU model was rewritten from scratch.
Now something I could be proud of - our with Darek paper "Virtualization without Direct Execution or Jitting: Designing a Portable Virtual Machine Infrastructure" was accepted to ISCA-35 workshop in Beijing, China.
So I am going to China in two weeks from now, attend ISCA conference and present my paper on workshop. After the conference I plan to take two weeks break from Bochs, Intel and Sandy Bridge and fly over China while trying to finish classic month trip in 16 days.
My current "minimum program" is to go Xian after Beijing, then Lijiang, Guiling/Yangshuo and back from Hong-Kong at 11 July. I hope to post pictures on my way even before I back, and of course bomb my Zenfolio with few hundreds megs of pictures at end of July after sorting a few DVDs of China landscapes :)