B Vance posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Wed, 25 Jan 2006 15:19:50 -0500:
> Thank you for explaining that Duncan. Guess it's time for me to start > reading a bit more then I have lately. Take a look at the stuff "Hannibal" has written for ArsTechnica. The articles are originally released "gratis" in HTML format. PDFs are available to ArsTech registered members (paid). He's very good at including lots of nice diagrams and the like, and explaining things in normal English. Reading the articles doesn't require all sorts of technical literacy. He also put out some articles explaining what pixel shaders and the like are, and how modern graphics cards work, again, with all sorts of nice diagrams and easily understood explanations that actually help one understand what it is those $500 cards have in them that allows them to charge that kind of money! ArsTechnica is of course a tech forum primarily aimed at gamers, altho they cover enough other stuff to be on my knewsticker feed (I don't consider myself a gamer). http://arstechnica.com The early article list: http://arstechnica.com/cpu/index.html Of special interest: Understanding Bandwidth and Latency (11/2002), Understanding the Microprocessor (12/2002), Understanding Pipelining and Superscalar Execution (12/2002), and Intro to 64-bit Computing and x86-64 (3/2003). The second list, bottom of http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu.ars Of interest there: Intro to Multithreading, Superthreading, and Hyperthreading, Pipelining parts I & II, and Inside AMD's Hammer: the 64-bit arch behind the Otperon and Athlon 64. Of course, if you are interested in articles on the Power arch, Intel's stuff, and the XBox 360, there are articles on that and more there as well. I /believe/ I've seen some of his articles reprinted elsewhere, too. I stumbled upon one that I recognized while googling at one point, on some Linux related site, IIRC. However, I'm not sure whether that was single-time or a regular thing, or how much after Ars gets them they can be reprinted elsewhere. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
