ideal dither

Reading: Dynamic Register Renaming Through Virtual-Physical Registers

By Doug Reed December 23, 2020microarchitecture, now reading, performanceNo Comments

Dynamic Register Renaming Through Virtual-Physical Registers Journal of Instruction Level Parallelism, 2000 In Summary The authors propose a simple change to PRF allocation that aims to reduce register pressure from…

Reading: Implementation of Precise Interrupts in Pipelined Processors

By dougr33d December 23, 2020microarchitecture, now readingNo Comments

Implementation of Precise Interrupts in Pipelined Processors SIGARCH 1985 In Summary This is Smith/Pleszkun's seminal paper on precise interrupts. At the time, most computer microarchitectures implemented a linear pipeline without…

Reading: eXtended Block Cache

By Doug Reed December 20, 2020caches, now reading, performanceNo Comments

eXtended Block Cache HPCA 2000In SummaryThe authors propose propose the eXtended Block Cache (XBC), a new structure to replace the Trace Cache (TC). XBC has similar latency and bandwidth to TC,…

Reading: High Performance Cache Replacement Using RRIP

By Doug Reed December 19, 2020caches, now reading, performance, replacementNo Comments

High Performance Cache Replacement Using Re-Reference Interval Prediction (RRIP) ISCA 2010 In Summary The authors propose (broadly) two new replacement policies, primarily useful in shared LLCs: Static RRIP: with this…

What to do with a lump sum?

By Doug Reed December 30, 2019personal financeNo Comments

A friend asks: My wife and I have recently purchased a home that we can comfortably afford. We have extra money in our budget that we'd like to put to…

On Buying and Renting

By Doug Reed January 31, 2019personal finance3 Comments

A friend I knew from high school recently posed an interesting question on Facebook: should she and her husband buy a house, or continue renting while paying off debt? The…

Austin Soil Map

By Doug Reed July 31, 2018miscNo Comments

Austin houses are rife with foundation issues. This seems chiefly due to the clay content our homes are built upon. This 1905 soil survey of Austin suggests that, at least as of…

About those “401(k) millionaires”…

By Doug Reed July 23, 2018personal financeNo Comments

Several months ago -- perhaps mid-January, and corresponding with the crest of the S&P500 -- a friend of mine around my age posted on social media about becoming a "401(k)…

A Quick and Easy Guide to the 3x3x3 Last Layer

By Doug Reed February 22, 2018cubeNo Comments

There are many approaches to solving the last layer (LL) of a Rubik's Cube. This is far from optimal in most regards, except for one: it is very easy to…

An Easy Guide to an Intuitive Fridrich F2L

By Doug Reed February 15, 2018cubeNo Comments

[NB: I wrote this document in 2004 for two reasons. First, I wanted to express a practical approach to how one might enhance their speedsolving without memorizing the 50+ F2L algorithms…