It has been more than two years since I last wrote anything here. The last post went up in June 2024. A lot has happened since (the About page has the summary), and somewhere in there I stopped writing in public. I want to fix that.
So here is the plan: one small post every weekday. Small means a few hundred words and one idea, a paper or a bit of news. Sometimes it will be just one plot or one surprising number. I started out writing long blogs but I think that led me to burn out. This time around, the objective is to write smaller, yet meaningful thoughts, measurements, reports on some of my open-source work and things that interest me.
What I'll write about:
- Memory. Caches, TLBs, DRAM and the odd things it does, measured on hardware I own.
- CPUs. Mostly build logs from diablo, my out-of-order RISC-V core, which I am rewriting in Bluespec.
- Interconnects. Be it CXL or chip interconnects like TileLink and AXI. I've been poking at CXL with TraceCXL.
- Things I build. A few repositories that have been sitting private will go public over the next few weeks, and each one deserves a write-up.
A few rules for myself:
- Every number comes with the machine, compiler and command that produced it, so you can rerun it.
- If I'm unsure about something, I'll say so.
- I will try and keep the blogs as concise as I can (with the occasional rambling or longer reporting on something truly intriguing).
Next up: the memory wall, the elephant in the room.