Monthly Archives: July 2012

CPU details you always wanted to know but never asked

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Here are two roughly 90mn long resources on these CPU details you always wanted to know but never asked:

An article giving an up to date, dense and well explained overview of microprocessors architecture: Modern Microprocessors – A 90 minutes guide!

A talk by Scott Meyers on CPU cache: CPU Caches and Why You Care. Although the recording could be much better to say the least, the talk is very worth watching, starting with very simple considerations and getting pretty far while staying crystal clear. The slides can be found here.

Update: the Scott Meyers talk referenced in the above link has been put behind a paywall. However he gave his talk again in 2014 at a conference, and the video is available. The new talk contains a few differences, and all in all I find it a bit harder to follow and a bit less entertaining (for some reason, the jokes don’t work as well as they did previously), but the recording quality is also much better.

History explained

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So yesterday was the announcement of a massive breakthrough: CERN have discovered a new particle thought to be a Higgs boson. This is a milestone discovery future generations will have in their textbooks. Maybe it is a good time to remind the excellent animation Jorge Cham published a few months ago, explaining in simple words what the Higgs boson is. (it is also a good time to have a look at the photos taken soon before the launch of the Large Hadron Collider)

Octree-Based Sparse Voxelization for Real-Time Global Illumination

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Last year Cyril Crassin presented a voxel based approach for interactively computing indirect diffuse and specular lighting, along with a couple of demonstration videos, and kept working on the matter since then.

In this talk given in May at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, he briefly explains the technique:

Interestingly enough, as he points out, the technique has been implemented in the Unreal Engine 4 already.