Intel's Optane memory modules launched with a lot of fanfare in 2015, and were recently discontinued, in 2022, with similar fanfare. It was a sad day for me, a lover of abstraction-breaking technologies, but it was forseeable and understandable. At the time of Optane's launch, a lot of us were excited about the idea of …

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A lot of ink is spent on the "monoliths vs. microservices" debate, but the real issue behind this debate is about whether distributed system architecture is worth the developer time and cost overheads. By thinking about the real operational considerations of our systems, we can get some insight into whether we actually …

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In performance work, you will often find many distributions that are weirdly shaped: fat-tailed distributions, distributions with a hard lower bound at a non-zero number, and distributions that are just plain odd. Particularly when you look at latency distributions, it is extremely common for the 99th percentile to be …

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In 2018, I took the jump from being primarily an FPGA hardware engineer to being primarily a software engineer. At the time, things were looking great for FPGA acceleration, with AWS and later Azure bringing in VMs with FPGAs and the two big FPGA vendors setting their sights on application acceleration. Almost 5 years …

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A post recently made the rounds on hacker news claiming that you should teach your kids poker, not chess. The comments on that post go through a lot of the reasons why poker is a bad game to teach your children, but I felt that I was well suited to opine on this topic, and explain why duplicate bridge is the best game …

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When we think of how to represent fractional numbers in code, we reach for double and float, and almost never reach for anything else. There are several alternatives, including constructive real numbers that are used in calculators, and rational numbers. One alternative predates all of these, including floating point, …

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I have been working on another post recently, also related to division, but I wanted to address a comment I got from several people on the previous division article. This comment invariably follows a lot of articles on using math to do things with chars and shorts. It is: "why are you doing all of this when you can …

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In honor of April Fools' Day, I decided to write about a blockchain topic. The crypto economy is in the process of speedrunning their way from zero to a modern economy, and when you move that fast, a few things have to break along the way. One of those things is corporate governance. Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" is a …

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Python and Assembly have one thing in common: as a professional software engineer, they are both languages that you probably should know how to read, but be terrified to write. These languages seem to be (and are) at opposite ends of the spectrum: One is almost machine code, and the other is almost a scripting …

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Occasionally, I like to peruse uops.info. It is a great resource for micro-optimization: benchmark every x86 instruction on every architecture, and compile the results. Every time I look at this table, there is one thing that sticks out to me: the DIV instruction. On a Coffee Lake CPU, an 8-bit DIV takes a long time: …

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