How CPUs do Out Of Order Operations - Computerphile

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  • Опубліковано 22 тра 2024
  • How CPUs that are capable can manage to complete tasks simultaneously without the program knowing. Matt Godbolt continues his series on how processors work.
    Many thanks to Space Potatoes for kind permission to use their music: 2020rendezvous.com/
    / computerphile
    / computer_phile
    This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
    Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
    Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. More at www.bradyharanblog.com
    Thank you to Jane Street for their support of this channel. Learn more: www.janestreet.com

КОМЕНТАРІ • 203

  • @momomi104
    @momomi104 24 дні тому +252

    A better example than a sausage factory, is a film production, all the scenes are filmed out of order, based on locations, crew availabilty etc..
    But as long as the editing is ordering the scenes in the script's order (program) the result for the viewer will be acceptable

    • @MattGodbolt
      @MattGodbolt 24 дні тому +15

      Nice analogy!

    • @johngaughan9399
      @johngaughan9399 24 дні тому +21

      Let's throw branch prediction into the mix.
      You have two units, each filming different scenes that take place at different times in the movie.
      Director/writer/producer make a script change, now the second unit has to re-record a new scene and disregard what they already filmed.

    • @klaxoncow
      @klaxoncow 23 дні тому +7

      Ah, we'll just fix it in post, right?

  • @MattGodbolt
    @MattGodbolt 24 дні тому +186

    I see folks are speculating on the topic already ;)

    • @MattGodbolt
      @MattGodbolt 24 дні тому +44

      And the people posting "first" ? " second" are displaying...out of order ;D

    • @giveaway4002
      @giveaway4002 24 дні тому +12

      hiii Mat, thanks for Compiler Explorer... i really love it. u r my inspiration

    • @MenaceInc
      @MenaceInc 24 дні тому +7

      Your puns, much like nearly all of your talks and tools, are great 👏

    •  24 дні тому +4

      The whole time you were talking about "as long as nobody notices", my brain was going "Spectre! Spectre! Spectre!" So, nice that you did indeed point it out at the end.
      I find it hard to explain to people who are technical enough to understand a little bit, but not deeply technical, how it is possible that the same bug existed in essentially every mainstream CPU on the planet, including both RISC and CISC ones, both big (e.g. POWER) and small (e.g. Cortex) ones, in Intel and AMD and Apple silicon, among others. And the answer is that it exploits one of the fundamental "tricks" that make *every* CPU fast, which is basically the trick you are explaining here.
      Of course, this is only the beginning as the new Go.Fetch vulnerability has shown which exploits data-dependent prefetching.

    • @VivekYadav-ds8oz
      @VivekYadav-ds8oz 24 дні тому +7

      WAIT WHAT THE FUDGE YOU ARE THEEE MATT GODBOLT!! WE HAVE A CELEBRITY OVER HERE OMG

  • @gojohnniegogo
    @gojohnniegogo 24 дні тому +51

    Bonus points for a Winamp reference. Topical too since the source code is being released in September!

    • @mgancarzjr
      @mgancarzjr 24 дні тому +13

      It really whips the llama's....

    • @Kanibulus
      @Kanibulus 23 дні тому +3

      What really? Why they release it?

  • @user-qf6yt3id3w
    @user-qf6yt3id3w 24 дні тому +54

    It's crazy how Tomasulo's algorithm for out of order execution was was first used in the IBM System/360 Model 91 released in 1967, predating the integrated circuit.

    • @logantcooper6
      @logantcooper6 20 днів тому +4

      We stand on the shoulders of giants.

  • @jaffarbh
    @jaffarbh 19 днів тому +6

    Simply brilliant. I would highly suggest covering Intel's "Itanium" CPU, and why it went awfully wrong.

  • @DubioserKerl
    @DubioserKerl 24 дні тому +32

    Hang on, I know that logo on the shirt.... is that...? Yes, it IS Godbolt!

  • @RKelleyCook
    @RKelleyCook 24 дні тому +38

    Love me the robots where W == waiting and W == working.

    • @MattGodbolt
      @MattGodbolt 24 дні тому +19

      Yeah... I didn't think that through properly did I. Last minute changes never a good idea. Hopefully you get the idea though?

    • @chitlitlah
      @chitlitlah 24 дні тому +2

      I was waiting for P to go from processing to paused.

    • @IceMetalPunk
      @IceMetalPunk 24 дні тому +3

      @@MattGodbolt Always allocate at least two bytes to your status strings 😉

    • @klaxoncow
      @klaxoncow 23 дні тому +4

      @@IceMetalPunk Strings? How wasteful.
      What you need is an enum. 0 = empty, 1 = ready, 2 = waiting, 3 = working, 4 = completed, 5 = retired.
      Only 3 bits needed (with a couple of statuses to spare - I already used one to represent "empty", as a null reference to say "ignore this row, as we've not filled it out with data yet". And if we need a human-readable string then we can have an array of strings: ['empty', 'ready', 'waiting', 'working', 'completed', 'retired'], using the status as the index.
      And you don't need the English language to start all the words you want to use with different letters at any point.

    • @repairtech9717
      @repairtech9717 2 дні тому

      ​@@klaxoncowthis is why the high level language Devs don't get much respect. They are severely lacking in fundamentals because they generally just know how to make a website.

  • @giveaway4002
    @giveaway4002 24 дні тому +62

    please, please more cpu videos....

    • @godnyx117
      @godnyx117 24 дні тому +3

      Agree! Low level, hardware related videos are awesome and very valuable!

  • @nicksamek12
    @nicksamek12 23 дні тому +1

    This series has been fantastic so far!

  • @unvergebeneid
    @unvergebeneid 24 дні тому +10

    The times where a sqrt would take 100 cycles are long gone. These days it's more on the order of 16-20 cycles. Still slow compared to a multiply or add but in the ballpark of a division.

    • @JonBrase
      @JonBrase 24 дні тому +4

      20 cycles is still enough time for ~100 instructions to pile into the ROB behind the sqrt at typical pipeline widths (plus whatever was already behind the sqrt when it started executing).

  • @SimGunther
    @SimGunther 24 дні тому +37

    Modern x86 CPUs will have a RISC kind of pipeline in the microcode level despite the base ISA not implying such pipelining.
    So to answer the main question, technically the CPU is doing (N core * pipeline phases / average cycles per instruction) things all at once, but that's not a neat answer since hyperthreading is possible and not all instructions run equally as latency from prediction rollbacks, cache locality/coherency, and write interference need to be considered, among many other things.

    • @surters
      @surters 24 дні тому +2

      N cores * issue width * average micro ops per instruction (max execution units) etc. etc. hundreds of limitations.

    • @monad_tcp
      @monad_tcp 24 дні тому +7

      This concept of RISC/CISC is an outdated idea. All modern CPUs are implemented using microcode, which is technically RISC and on top of it we have a CISC ISA, they're all hybrid . Yes, even the simpler ones like those who use RISC-V end up having even smaller microcode for implementation, its just convenient.

    • @trevinbeattie4888
      @trevinbeattie4888 24 дні тому +2

      ​@@monad_tcpI wouldn’t consider microcode a type of RISC since that layer typically isn’t exposed at the programmable instruction level and only microchip designers who are working with something like Verilog actually use that level of coding.

    • @ArneChristianRosenfeldt
      @ArneChristianRosenfeldt 24 дні тому

      MIPS exposes the pipeline as branch delay slot. RISCV kicked it out again. We are back at 8086 like ISA. MIPS already hid any data hazards of the pipeline and would rather wait for the cache or main memory.
      Ah, you mean that a load instruction is kinda the start of a pipeline. Next comes a compute instruction. Yeah.

    • @thewhitefalcon8539
      @thewhitefalcon8539 23 дні тому +1

      There isn't a fixed number of pipeline phases.

  • @marcwinner567
    @marcwinner567 24 дні тому +3

    Thanks so much for these videos. Matt is truly a great teacher of these concepts!

  • @gekko434
    @gekko434 4 дні тому

    Thanks Computerphile, I've been loving these series on how CPUs work. Absolutely fascinating, even for a layperson like me

  • @susstevedev
    @susstevedev 24 дні тому +18

    "Well I feel like this is a i don't know if you've ever watched Qi where the big bell goes-"
    *"BRRRRRRRR"*

    • @RecycleBin0
      @RecycleBin0 24 дні тому

      lego can do almost anything

    • @susstevedev
      @susstevedev 23 дні тому

      @@RecycleBin0 It's GR8BRIK's old logo

  • @frankbucciantini388
    @frankbucciantini388 19 днів тому +1

    Years later someone finally explaining the Spectre / Meltdown bug properly. This is why software mitigations make the CPUs affected much slower: they limit if not disable entirely this kind of mechanism.

  • @IceMetalPunk
    @IceMetalPunk 24 дні тому +3

    As a web dev, this reminds me a ton of database transactions. You can update many columns in many rows in a database table at once, but if one fails, the transaction fails as a whole; it's "undone" because the changes never get committed to the database in the first place.

    • @BarafuAlbino
      @BarafuAlbino 23 дні тому +1

      What is above, so is below. What is below, so is above.

  • @zwanz0r
    @zwanz0r 21 день тому

    Very nice episode! Great explanation with the todo board 😊. A great follow-up would be how modern CPUs prevent specter-like attacks, because i assumed the cache would also be reset after branch prediction failed.

  • @chaoslab
    @chaoslab 23 дні тому

    Coding assembly on the first few Archimedes machines was very interesting, multiple logical options with instructions (like conditional execution and barrel shifting).

  • @Darkknight512
    @Darkknight512 24 дні тому +15

    This really kicks the llamas ass.

    • @loudej
      @loudej 24 дні тому

      Well and truly kicked indeed

  • @FutureAIDev2015
    @FutureAIDev2015 24 дні тому +11

    Jump instructions have entered the chat

  • @unvergebeneid
    @unvergebeneid 24 дні тому +3

    14:31 "Honey, why are you shouting'Pee! Pee!' into your phone?"
    "No, mum! I'm shouting 'p' _at_ my phone."
    "Well whatever it is you do with pee and your phone, it is rather odd, isn't it, and I'd prefer for you to do it in your room."

  • @adfaklsdjf
    @adfaklsdjf 18 днів тому

    thanks for mentioning spectre at the end :)

  • @Modvivek
    @Modvivek 24 дні тому

    Amazing video ❤

  • @bemk
    @bemk 21 день тому +1

    This something you don't generally need, but when you do need it it's very useful to have. Had a bug the other day in an embedded system where the file system chip would put data on the bus despite its driver never asking for it, because an RSA calculation somehow triggered a speculative read in the chip's DMA region. Debugging was infuriating, 'cause every time you'd change some code to do an inspection, or would even interfere with a debugger, you'd interfere with the pipeline causing the bug to disappear. Only reason we ended up finding the solution was due to some very kind and skilled people in some forums all over the internet and an erratum for the chip

    • @andrewharrison8436
      @andrewharrison8436 20 днів тому

      Parallel processing can be "fun" to debug. I once had an exit process that started failing. It ran perfectly in debug because waiting for me to respond to the prompt gave the parallel clean up process time to complete. My fix was a bodge: I shuffled the order of my code till it worked. My best guess as to the cause of the failures was that a release of the compiler or operating system had done something to the timings.

    • @bemk
      @bemk 20 днів тому +1

      @@andrewharrison8436 been there, done that, joined the club, got the t-shirt.
      At least it's a problem you can solve with some semaphores though...
      That said, the feeling you get when you actually solve an issue like this. Very satisfying

  • @veers0r
    @veers0r 24 дні тому +1

    Love the compiler explorer. :)

  • @scaredyfish
    @scaredyfish 24 дні тому +4

    I like the desktop background - where's it from?

  • @Omnifarious0
    @Omnifarious0 24 дні тому +7

    5:00 - I think the first to do "pseudo-assembly" was Knuth with MIX. Though, his "pseudo-assembly" was perhaps more rigorous than what you intended.

  • @borchen0
    @borchen0 21 день тому +1

    Do modern compilers produce machinecode that help the CPU with this process? A sort of preprocess, so less stuff has to be undone?

  • @froop2393
    @froop2393 24 дні тому

    Where can I get such a cool compiler explorer hoodie?
    btw: great tool, really love it!

  • @goshisanniichi
    @goshisanniichi 23 дні тому

    I remember from a computer engineering course long ago, that there was a branch "prediction" scheme with superscalar processors where the prediction part was skipped altogether. Because the processor was capable of doing multiple things at once, it could just process both branches simultaneously and throw out the one that wasn't needed at the point when the branch was finally processed. I don't think it was actually ever used and if it was then not much because actual attempts at prediction are still better in most cases.

    • @techmage89
      @techmage89 22 дні тому +2

      Some GPUs actually do this! They run hundreds or thousands of threads over the same code, but execute groups of threads in lockstep, so if a group of threads encounters a branch and they don't all take the same path, they will all run both branches and then mask out the results from the wrong branch. It's basically a way of fitting branching into a SIMD pipeline.

  • @MartinLindsay
    @MartinLindsay 22 дні тому

    One nitpick on the description of the "retirement" stage you described, and I apologize as I realize it may be a detail intentionally not visited here. While it is simple to say that it goes down in order committing things back out of the cpu, it only prevents committing if there is an unresolved conditional branch before the instruction. Things otherwise can commit back to main memory or cache out of order, and is one reason that atomics use acquire/release semantics to assert control over the ordering.

  • @axelBr1
    @axelBr1 22 дні тому

    It's amazing what can be implemented using logic gates etched into silicon.

  • @TymexComputing
    @TymexComputing 24 дні тому +1

    No Byte Bug puzzle here? Jane Street has addressed today's Numberphile BugByte puzzle 1-24 as Computerphile puzzle.

    • @TymexComputing
      @TymexComputing 24 дні тому

      src="/static/img/new/computerphile-puzzle-2024.png"

  • @davidhand9721
    @davidhand9721 21 день тому

    How is it writing values to that table, then checking those values to see if it's ready, without going through at least one clock cycle? How are they managing synchronization?

  • @YaofuZhou
    @YaofuZhou 24 дні тому +2

    I guess if you throw security considerations into the mix, things quickly become super complicated ;)

  • @discoisdead8504
    @discoisdead8504 24 дні тому

    Nice vid about cpu internals 👍

  • @jeromethiel4323
    @jeromethiel4323 24 дні тому +1

    Winamp, it whips the llamas ass! ^-^ What a blast from the past.

  • @rogerlevasseur397
    @rogerlevasseur397 23 дні тому

    Let's dive into Very Long Instruction Set computer architecture (Intel's Itanium and Multiflow's minisuper) where the compiler from it's analysis determines which instructions run in parallel together. simplifies the pipeline.

  • @eliasross4576
    @eliasross4576 24 дні тому

    Interestingly for concurrent programming, out of order operations like stores can be visible to other threads since the pipeline executor won’t have visibility into what another pipeline executor is doing.

    • @MattGodbolt
      @MattGodbolt 24 дні тому +1

      It very much depends on your CPU architecture. X86 makes some pretty strong guarantees (for normal load and stores). And speculative stores shouldn't be visible to other threads under any circumstance that I'm aware of.

  • @Tahgtahv
    @Tahgtahv 24 дні тому

    So, mentioned at the end of the video were issues that sounded like they might affect timing. (eg, something unexpected was in a cache, or got bumped out of a cache.) However, how do you account for actual memory side effects? For example, there are some chips that automatically advance an address on reads/writes. How do you ensure that access to such a chip is strictly in order, with no speculative/out of order access?

    • @henryprickett5899
      @henryprickett5899 24 дні тому

      You only write at the retire stage (writes are in order) and you cache "writes" to another buffer so that out of order reads get the right result at the right time. Beyond that, cache coherency protocols keep it safe between processors.

    • @henryprickett5899
      @henryprickett5899 24 дні тому

      That is to say, you cache out of order writes before retirement locally, so that out of order reads see the correct values and don't need to wait for writes to retire.

  • @Kalernor
    @Kalernor 22 дні тому +2

    Which area of computer science is this? Where can I learn more about it?
    Also, what is this topic called? Out of order operations? Again, where can I learn more about it?

  • @jeromethiel4323
    @jeromethiel4323 24 дні тому +3

    I just learned not that long ago, that Cray computers invented a lot of what you were talking about in this video. Multiple streams, pipelining (not the idea, making it better), out of order execution, et al. It's why Cray was able to hold on to the title of supercomputer for so long. They were doing things nobody else at the time could. And now it's part of pretty much every modern processor. It was a heady time.

    • @JonnyPowell
      @JonnyPowell 24 дні тому +3

      it was a Crayzy time

    • @johngaughan9399
      @johngaughan9399 24 дні тому

      For much of computing history, microcomputers (i.e. Intel+AMD) followed the lead of mainframes (i.e. Cray+IBM).
      Modern NASes allow the user to hot-swap hard drives. Back in the 1970s, mainframes allowed the user to hot swap CPUs and RAM. I still can't do that in an AMD64 system in 2024.

    • @R.B.
      @R.B. 23 дні тому

      I can see how Cray multicore systems could schedule a process across multiple cores, but I don't think it is the same as multicore CPUs of today. Memory access and caching would be significant in an SMP way. At the processor level you can take advantage of shared L1 cache on a single thread. I think Cray was more about distrubuted threads, but each thread wasn't context switching.
      What's interesting to me about this is that it suggests that the core of a CPU could get into a deadlock lower than potential software dreadlocks between threads.

  • @stephenwhite506
    @stephenwhite506 23 дні тому

    In a single cycle, modern CPUs are performing thousands of XORs in parallel for every cache line check and can do this in parallel for each of the instruction, data or address translation caches. So, the answer should be thousands.

  • @MissNorington
    @MissNorington 24 дні тому

    CPUs are actually much faster than in this example. They can see ahead of time that you are squaring the numbers, so there is no need to square root at the end. The robots inside the CPU are probably trained with captcha as well, which is still legal when this comment was written

  • @user-dv5gm2gc3u
    @user-dv5gm2gc3u 21 день тому

    once heard jim keller talk about this in an interview. Kinda insane what's happening in a cpu nowadays.

  • @Lion_McLionhead
    @Lion_McLionhead 23 дні тому

    So what's the Apple M3 & raspberry pi 5's biggest weapon?

  • @shadamethyst1258
    @shadamethyst1258 24 дні тому +1

    Obviously when the branch prediction fails, a lot of these instructions need to be thrown out and redone, but is there anything stopping a CPU core from taking instructions from both branches, adding it to this out of order table, and letting both get executed until it knows which branch is taken and can evict all of the instructions from the wrong branch?

    • @nayjames123
      @nayjames123 24 дні тому +4

      Given you'd have to create a new instruction stream for every branch you see, and how frequently you come across branches. You'd end up needing a huge amount of instruction streams that are nearly all going to be discarded. The cost of adding all these streams is also gonna be very high and cause bottlenecks.
      To help the throughput when there are branch mispredictions CPU vendors created things like hyper threaded cores, where if one stream of instructions has a mis predict, the other stream will have less contention for execution units so likely be able to run a little quicker

    • @jeromethiel4323
      @jeromethiel4323 24 дні тому

      I thought this a while ago, and realized that it would fail pretty quickly, just based on how often branches happened. The real issue is that the processor is already so much faster than the memory, that the memory is the weakest link here, not the processor. If you tried to fill both branches of the pipeline, that's twice the memory bandwidth.
      If it's all in cache, you might be okay, but can you guarantee that? You cannot.
      Especially when your pipeline is as deep as it is in modern CPU's.

    • @Revoker1221
      @Revoker1221 24 дні тому +3

      What you're describing is predicated execution which tend to happen a lot in vectorised computing and pipelines, think SIMD or GPUs, where both sides of a branch are executed but only one side of the branch is kept at a time. An advantage of this approach is that you get to keep the speed boost of vectorised computing, but at the cost of reduced throughput as extra code is ran.
      If you're interested in learning more, you can read "Conversion of control dependence to data dependence" for one of the first places where this idea was introduced and fleshed out, or for something more modern, give "ISPC: A SPMD compiler for high performance CPU programming" a look over (or any other modern day SIMD tutorial. Most SIMD these days come with instructions purpose built for this kind of predicated filtering)

    • @ArneChristianRosenfeldt
      @ArneChristianRosenfeldt 24 дні тому

      @@jeromethiel4323branch prediction also fails pretty fast based on how often branches happen. Or is there some “bunching” of successful predictions?

    • @henryprickett5899
      @henryprickett5899 24 дні тому +2

      Usually successful predictions happen in a row. 99% hit rate looks more like 1 million hits followed by 10k misses than 100 hits followed by 1 miss.

  • @TiT8851
    @TiT8851 24 дні тому

    Great, but what happen to the pipeline when an interrupt occur (like syscall or time slice expired from OS)?

    • @trevinbeattie4888
      @trevinbeattie4888 24 дні тому

      An interrupt is basically a jump with some extra steps to save the current CPU state and switch to a new context, so I imagine it has to go through the pipeline just like any other part of the program. Whatever is currently in the pipeline may either finish going through or be discarding depending on how interrupt handling is implemented.

    • @TiT8851
      @TiT8851 24 дні тому

      Thank you.

  • @EdgyNumber1
    @EdgyNumber1 19 днів тому

    Remember the early days when XBox programmers slated PS3 CELL because it was 'too slow?' It took a while to shake off the old way of doing things and really jump on board the idea of parallel computing. Are modern x86 processors able to handle true parallelism these days or have they simply had to bodge something extra onto what is ancient architecture?

  • @deltamico
    @deltamico 24 дні тому

    If this paralelism is integrated, does the bend language achieve anything?

    • @solhsa
      @solhsa 23 дні тому

      Compilers can do larger scale things, and discard operations altogether, which is way harder on this level.

  • @The_Pariah
    @The_Pariah 21 день тому

    To this day, I STILL use WinAmp.
    Best music player ever.

  • @unvergebeneid
    @unvergebeneid 24 дні тому +3

    You just know he chose a whiteboard because he was under the illusion that he'd just erase the old values in the cells instead of making a complete mess by repeatedly crossing things out 😄

  • @dakiloth
    @dakiloth 24 дні тому

    Is it possible for a processor to calculate both branches of a branch?

    • @solhsa
      @solhsa 23 дні тому

      yes, and I think I've read some cpu archs doing that... might have been itanium, but I'm not sure. It's wasteful, though.

  • @NatePerdomo
    @NatePerdomo 24 дні тому

    What is his purple buffalo desktop wallpaper image?

    • @MattGodbolt
      @MattGodbolt 24 дні тому +5

      It's one of the default Ubuntu ones; a Minotaur I think?

    • @darrengreen7906
      @darrengreen7906 24 дні тому +2

      @@MattGodbolt Mantic Minotaur 23.10

    • @3rdalbum
      @3rdalbum 24 дні тому

      He'll want to upgrade that before too long, doesn't it go end of life in a few days?

  • @henrycobb
    @henrycobb 24 дні тому +2

    When a machine is out of order it needs to get fixed. C.f. the Spectre and Meltdown bugs.

  • @stevefan8283
    @stevefan8283 24 дні тому

    7:12 but can't this example be implemented with a fused-multiply add and a hardware square root instead...?

    • @trevinbeattie4888
      @trevinbeattie4888 24 дні тому

      It’s only a model

    • @kevinscales
      @kevinscales 24 дні тому

      The CPU he is emulating doesn't have that, no

    • @solhsa
      @solhsa 23 дні тому

      you might as well have a single instruction that calculates distance. It's just an example.

  • @VandalIO
    @VandalIO 24 дні тому +1

    Is there a video of how alu does barrel shifting ?

    • @AnotherPointOfView944
      @AnotherPointOfView944 24 дні тому +1

      several ways, depending on the number of bits/word. Easiest way is lookup table.

    • @user-qf6yt3id3w
      @user-qf6yt3id3w 24 дні тому

      If you have a bunch of registers of the input shifting 0 bits, 1, bit, up to 32 or 64 bits and then just select from the one you need you've got a barrel shifter. It's simple but it obviously takes up a lot of area.

    • @VandalIO
      @VandalIO 24 дні тому

      @@user-qf6yt3id3w I know how that works ! But how’d you implement that in pure logic ? , just try designing an 8 bit barely shifter with logic gates and multiplexors, it gets crazy complicated

    • @VandalIO
      @VandalIO 24 дні тому

      @@AnotherPointOfView944 lookup table is cheating 😂

    • @user-qf6yt3id3w
      @user-qf6yt3id3w 24 дні тому

      @@VandalIO On an IC the wiring is not too bad because you can run the bit lines diagonally. Obviously you can't get around the fact that an n bit barrel shifter needs an n*n array of cells. Or even 2n*n if you want expanding shifts which is handy in graphics.On the other hand the cell doesn't need to be a flip flop.
      Actually if you read the Wiki article there's a better way to do it which is better for wider devices"
      "The very fastest shifters are implemented as full crossbars, in a manner similar to the 4-bit shifter depicted above, only larger. These incur the least delay, with the output always a single gate delay behind the input to be shifted (after allowing the small time needed for the shift count decoder to settle; this penalty, however, is only incurred when the shift count changes). These crossbar shifters require however n2 gates for n-bit shifts. Because of this, the barrel shifter is often implemented as a cascade of parallel 2×1 multiplexers instead, which allows a large reduction in gate count, now growing only with n x log n; the propagation delay is however larger, growing with log n (instead of being constant as with the crossbar shifter).
      For an 8-bit barrel shifter, two intermediate signals are used which shifts by four and two bits, or passes the same data, based on the value of S[2] and S[1]. This signal is then shifted by another multiplexer, which is controlled by S[0]"

  • @kayakMike1000
    @kayakMike1000 18 днів тому

    Depends on how many hardware thread cores it has. RISC-V calls these harts.

  • @ukyoize
    @ukyoize 19 днів тому

    I wonder why there isn't "Don't predict this branch, or predict it THIS way" for security.

  • @ScottLovenberg
    @ScottLovenberg 24 дні тому +2

    "I'll give myself infinite registers." - hold every possible outcome and just keep paying the memory wall tax. Now it's a physics problem.

    • @ScottLovenberg
      @ScottLovenberg 24 дні тому

      Wait.... We can't pack them close enough to use this solution. Nevermind. I just moved the memory wall to everywhere and introduced a singularity to the least efficient solution. My bad, guys.

    • @solhsa
      @solhsa 23 дні тому

      @@ScottLovenberg See also: SSA form, example: spir-v.

  • @NatePerdomo
    @NatePerdomo 24 дні тому

    I'm usually lost about 45 seconds into these videos. Still love 'em, though.

    • @surters
      @surters 24 дні тому

      Hey, just read the entire "Computer Architecture - a Quantitative approach" and you will understand!!!

  • @phasm42
    @phasm42 20 днів тому

    Interesting that Itanium tried to move this complexity out of the CPU and into the compiler, but ultimately keeping this stuff in the hardware (x86) won.

  • @ProjectPhysX
    @ProjectPhysX 20 днів тому

    My computer does 3584 instructions at once. GPU SIMT magic.

  • @seanharricharan7602
    @seanharricharan7602 2 дні тому

    What does he actually mean when he says he has 4 CPUs on his laptop with 10 Units each?

  • @martinbakker7615
    @martinbakker7615 24 дні тому +3

    Hate these kind of questions because they are never specific enough. Eg, he says in the 80 computers did one thing at a time. Reading bits out of memory still was 8 at a time.

    • @werds1392
      @werds1392 24 дні тому +3

      He’s talking about one clock cycle

    • @ArneChristianRosenfeldt
      @ArneChristianRosenfeldt 24 дні тому

      Bit logic is a Vector Computer Right there. Archimedes had a 32bit ALU in 1987. And 32 bit memory bus. 68k had 16 bit in the 70s, but needs 4 cycles for everything.

    • @toby9999
      @toby9999 24 дні тому +1

      Depends on how you define one thing... 8bits OR is it one byte...

  • @vernacularbarnarchitecture
    @vernacularbarnarchitecture 11 днів тому

  • @gregorymorse8423
    @gregorymorse8423 23 дні тому

    Square root is a one tick unary operation as fast as an add. Common misconception. Trig instructions are slowest on modern CPUs

  • @RealCadde
    @RealCadde 24 дні тому +1

    The answer to the question changes based on definition.
    If you subscribe to the notion that computers can do as many things as there are cores in the system, then computers can to thousands of things every clock cycle. Assuming the computer has a graphics card with that many cores.
    If you also subscribe to the notion that each core does many things at the same time on every clock cycle, well then you have many thousands of things happening every clock cycle.
    And if you then look at a "super computer" (a rack of computers all tied together) well now they do millions to billions of things, billions of times per second.
    But realistically, computers (doesn't matter how many cores they have, how many memories they have, how their pipelines are set up) can only really do ONE thing per clock cycle.
    At the end of the day, there NORMALLY is a single INPUT and a single OUTPUT. You can do one INPUT every clock cycle and you can do one OUTPUT every clock cycle.
    Yes, there are many cases where inputs and outputs are completely separated from each other. They don't cross communicate in ANY way, they could just as well be separate computers doing separate things. But then i'd argue that you should have asked "how many things can N number of computers do" and the answer would be N things.
    So WHY can't many inputs and outputs be handled by a single computer at the same time, all the time? Because the inputs and outputs, somewhere in the process, needs to "talk" to each other or the operating system or a shared storage or the network. Once they do, they are bottlenecked by that interaction.
    Just because a modern computer can work on many different tasks at the same time, it still isn't truly completely parallel.
    The universe is truly parallel, there are no bottlenecks in that sense. So are, i would argue at least, quantum computers. Digital computers are only multitasking MID process, but at the end of the day everything comes together at a single input and output point.

    • @bity-bite
      @bity-bite 24 дні тому +1

      If a CPU had two cores, it means it has four threads, which means it can do 4 things at the same time, right? Would it mean the CPU accepts 4 inputs and with 4 outputs?

    • @landsgevaer
      @landsgevaer 24 дні тому

      A computer can simultaneously display a cursor, rotate its fan, make a mouse click noise, stimulate my retina, heat the room, annoy the cat, support a geranium, etc...

    • @RealCadde
      @RealCadde 24 дні тому +1

      @@landsgevaer In a time slice...

    • @RealCadde
      @RealCadde 24 дні тому

      @@bity-bite A CPU can have 1, 2, 3, 4... cores.
      Doesn't matter though because it still depends on definition.
      I see each core as a separate computer.

    • @trevinbeattie4888
      @trevinbeattie4888 24 дні тому +4

      If you go to the microarchitecture level (as suggested in the video), a single CPU core can do as many operations as it has processing units for. If you go down further to the transistor level, a CPU can do millions of gate operations at once. It all depends on what “things” you’re counting.

  • @joshd79
    @joshd79 24 дні тому +4

    Winamp!

  • @ve3uom
    @ve3uom 24 дні тому

    OMG I suddenly miss Winamp!

  • @alex84632
    @alex84632 24 дні тому

    Why don't compilers do this with cpu cores to automatically make every program multi-threaded? Too much overhead?

    • @solhsa
      @solhsa 23 дні тому

      There is actually some research into "multi-core single threading", but as far as I know it never got anywhere.

    • @kazedcat
      @kazedcat 21 день тому

      The problem is branch prediction. Unless you are running and calculating real values you cannot do branch prediction at compiler time.

  • @floppy8568
    @floppy8568 8 днів тому

    This guy has 4 10-core CPUs in his laptop

  • @VaughanMcAlley
    @VaughanMcAlley 23 дні тому

    I wonder how much higher level scripting languages benefit from this. Presumably a fair bit as the interpreters are mostly just C programs…

  • @ElvenSpellmaker
    @ElvenSpellmaker 24 дні тому

    Spectre and Meltdown want to fight!

  • @badcrab7494
    @badcrab7494 24 дні тому

    Before watching, Speculative computation?

    • @MrJleonp
      @MrJleonp 24 дні тому

      That's an acceleration method, they will probably talk about how CPU aren't really multitasking, just assigning cru cycles to different tasks.

  • @drooplug
    @drooplug 24 дні тому +1

    RIP Winamp.

    • @nathanbolstad9567
      @nathanbolstad9567 24 дні тому

      Nope. It's being released as open source (recent news!) Expect it to reappear soon!

    • @nathanbolstad9567
      @nathanbolstad9567 24 дні тому

      24 Sep 2024 is the announce release of the source!

  • @snowballeffect7812
    @snowballeffect7812 23 дні тому

    love the QI reference lol

  • @esra_erimez
    @esra_erimez 24 дні тому

    26th?

  • @zxuiji
    @zxuiji 24 дні тому

    7:07 For the game example you gave this would actually be way more than you need. Just multiply √0.5 against t1 + t3 and you'll get a close enough (if not exact) result. √0.5 just needs to be done once at the start of the game and stored for later use.

  • @philipmurphy2
    @philipmurphy2 24 дні тому +2

    Computerphile would never air on UK TV, it's way too smart for the TV broadcasters these days

  • @JohnSmith-op7ls
    @JohnSmith-op7ls 24 дні тому +4

    The correct answer is one. Just because multi-core CPUs can do more than one at a time doesn’t change that because they’re really just multiple CPUs with some shared resources, on the same wafer. It’s a more compact version of multi-processor motherboards. Each core is a CPU and doing one thing at a time. We’ve bastardized the meaning of CPU for simplicity when it comes to multi-core chips, but logically they are not a single unit, they are multiple units working in tandem.

    • @professorx4047
      @professorx4047 24 дні тому +1

      Well he said computer not cpu

    • @ArneChristianRosenfeldt
      @ArneChristianRosenfeldt 24 дні тому

      Isn’t it interesting how you can lock() an object in Java on one core, and the other cores respect this despite the widespread use of cache? How did that work with CPUs, like the two SH2 in SEGA 32x? Jaguar and PS3 cell only have scratchpad memory. JRISC in the Jaguar can access shared memory, but lacks instructions for locks. I think that it was not allowed for two of the 3 (4) processors to write to the same object . Only producer, consumer pipeline was allowed. So, in a queue each party only writes to their pointer: read or write. Each party reads the other pointer to check if the queue is full or empty.

    • @nathanbolstad9567
      @nathanbolstad9567 24 дні тому +1

      You can only write to a RAM cell from one source. The bus gets locked. CPUs have had a test and set instruction basically forever.
      The instruction locks the bus until complete.
      Locks in high level languages mark that team cel (logically) as volatile which forces the view on the CPU to skip the cache and go out to the memory every time to ensure the lock can be acquired.
      As a result, locking has greater overhead and has greater affect than code that doesn't require locking/semaphores. Locking hurts parallelism too.
      As a result, in recent years, there has been a fair amount of work on basic data structures and the like that can be implemented without locks to address the pain of locking and scalability.

    • @ArneChristianRosenfeldt
      @ArneChristianRosenfeldt 22 дні тому

      @@nathanbolstad9567 volatile in C just prevents that the value is „cached“ in a register. A binary compiled for my 386sx doesn’t know about cache. Only thing is that writes to video ram or sound queues are so large that it flushes any write back buffer. X86 has ports to signal that the value has to go out.
      Quake light maps were calculated on a 4 CPU Pentium board. No test and set instruction.
      So like on game consoles of the time lockless data structures were common. Amiga broke the 68k TAS instruction because the blitter and the CPU were never supposed to write into the same data structure.

  • @vadrif-draco
    @vadrif-draco 3 дні тому

    Damn, winamp

  • @genejones7902
    @genejones7902 24 дні тому

    Ah, so cpus do a few calculation (multi-cores) at once, and gpus do thousands of operation at the same time. Got it, I think. 😁

  • @ehfik
    @ehfik 24 дні тому

    ahh, winamp.

  • @love_exegence
    @love_exegence 24 дні тому

    He’s cute

  • @syjwg
    @syjwg 24 дні тому

    Instead of two inputs, I'm sure a computer in the future will handle three inputs. Something like 1 + 2 + 3, That would be awesome.

    • @pudy2487
      @pudy2487 24 дні тому +1

      Three-operand instructions are as old as x86 is with LEA being the earliest and most important among them. Most vector instructions nowadays take 3 operands as well, so that a separate destination register may be specified.

  • @dipi71
    @dipi71 19 днів тому

    21:34 Of course we notice - branch prediction uses more power and generates more waste heat. It can also rip nice holes into your cyber security.
    It angers me to state all that in the first place.

  • @var67
    @var67 22 дні тому

    Has a whiteboard which is easy to wipe, still crosses out all the old words...........

  • @yootoobvyooer
    @yootoobvyooer 22 дні тому

    AI will bring back VLIW.

    • @KingJellyfishII
      @KingJellyfishII 20 днів тому

      what makes you say that?

    • @yootoobvyooer
      @yootoobvyooer 20 днів тому

      @@KingJellyfishII efficiency. There is cost to figuring out operation order, and doing it every time is not as efficient as at compile time.

  • @Cypeq
    @Cypeq 24 дні тому +2

    CPUs have a little higher frequency than 2-3 Ghz nowadays...

    • @trevinbeattie4888
      @trevinbeattie4888 24 дні тому

      Not much higher. I think the record was set at 5.5GHz back in 2012, but most processors are still in the 2-4GHz range due to problems with signal propagation time and heat generation when running at higher speeds.

    • @mgancarzjr
      @mgancarzjr 24 дні тому

      ​@@trevinbeattie48889117.75 MHz Intel Core i9 14900KS earlier in March.

    • @ArneChristianRosenfeldt
      @ArneChristianRosenfeldt 24 дні тому

      @@trevinbeattie4888and what if we would take a RISC core from for example the PlayStation? It is tiny. Run those at the high clock and spread them along the edge of the die to get rid of their heat. The rest of the chip is slow cache.

    • @Cypeq
      @Cypeq 24 дні тому

      @trevinbeattie4888 maybe that's an average overall but desktop pc cpus are between 5 and 6ghz across the board.

    • @Cypeq
      @Cypeq 24 дні тому

      @trevinbeattie4888 and what is the point of bringing up a record that is like stock ac clock of current i9

  • @Wooksley
    @Wooksley 24 дні тому +1

    Computers are stuck at 2-3 GHz? Huh? More like 5-6 at the high end. Even laptop chips can clock above 5 nowadays.

    • @solhsa
      @solhsa 23 дні тому

      That's still just a multiply of 2, whereas parallel execution can multiply by way more.

    • @Wooksley
      @Wooksley 23 дні тому +1

      @@solhsa yes, I’m well aware of that. I use parallel computations basically every day in my scripts. They can be a pain to write, they eat a lot of ram, and they can be crazy fast if you don’t run into some other bottleneck like memory or storage i/o. But stating that CPUs are stuck at 2-3 GHz is just factually wrong, because they aren’t. My 7940hs can reach 5 depending on the workload and my 13700k runs above 5 GHz at stock.

  • @slalomsteve
    @slalomsteve 24 дні тому

    Third?

  • @b1lleman
    @b1lleman 24 дні тому

    first LOL ?

  • @Disguised_Hawk
    @Disguised_Hawk 23 дні тому +2

    Please use the correct terms for things you are explaining. Like, don't call a processor that has more cores than one a computer with multiple CPUs. The computer still has one CPU that contains multiple cores, which individually are hyperthreading the instructions. Not naming things correctly or at all makes the thing you explain very hard to relate to other information that one might have on this topic. Therefore people will learn less because they can't connect it. Naming cores CPUs makes people who already what you are talking about either confused or suspicious of your research. PLEASE just name things the CORRECT way. Otherwise the main part of this video is better than the beginning, thankfully

    • @KingJellyfishII
      @KingJellyfishII 20 днів тому +1

      the problem is that "CPU" is quite an ill-defined term. Most people use it to refer to the chip or even whole unit that contains one or more cores, but by a computer science definition each core is in fact its own CPU. It's simply an inconsistency in naming between the "layperson" and the "academic", for lack of better words.

  • @izzycrybaby1164
    @izzycrybaby1164 19 днів тому

    Please backup all your videos to a github repository for the day UA-cam goes extinct or otherwise has some kind of wipe

    • @slimhazard
      @slimhazard 18 днів тому

      Then the risk becomes github going extinct or getting wiped.

  • @ChrisStavros
    @ChrisStavros 23 дні тому

    "How many things can a computer do at once?"
    0:22 "only once"
    1:15 "how many things can it do at a time? and again you might think: once"
    I feel like I'm having a stroke here. Why do you think "once" is a valid answer to "how many AT ONCE"?