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walsufnir on 12 March 2014
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Dr.Henry_Killinger said:
walsufnir said:
Dr.Henry_Killinger said:
Dark_Feanor said:
Good, those are things that every Computer Science/Engineer learn in the first semester of the course. And you only really understand by the graduation, and may be never work with it.

Any way, GDDR 5 has nothing special, it just faster than normal DDR 3, but it´s interesting a game studio working that close to the metal for optmisation, that is the benefit of working in only one platform.

For me the guys at Epic and Cryteck are the real gods.


No, this is exactly what we were taught in the first semester *of the course*.

ISA, computer architecture, data paths, single cycle vs. multi-cycle data paths, branch prediction, score boards, caching (strategies, layout, misses), victim caches, data hazards, pipeline stalls, memory layout, cache snooping... All what is on these slides. All the did is fill it up with actual values.

When I read "PS4 has “really really good” branch prediction hardware" then it's not because of the wonder machine PS4 but that AMD has implemented good branch prediction in their CPUs so this applies to all processors of this kind.

No way are you learning that in first semester, first year possibly. But computer architecture might be an introductory course, it is frankly irresponsible to teach it as the first semester, even in an honors course it would be touched on tangentially.

Furthermore, in an introductory course your learning general stuff for standard x86 and x86-64 architectures, sure that might help you understand what they are talking about and its relatively simple, but without hands on practice, which would be rare in a college course if not and implasible in an introductory course, you wouldn't know how to implement any of this which is what matters when building an engine.

That why saying Devs who work with this and have had experience with this are familiar with it but suggesting that the system architecture that one learns in introductory , not first semester -_- courses, is ludicrous.


So you failed *twice* in reading... I even used "*" to make it even more clear. OF THE COURSE. Usually computer architecture lasts longer than 1 semester. No one is talking about the 1st semester you have when starting studying...

Second, it is not important which architecture you learn because the principles are the same throughout most of the processors. We did SPARC, MIPS and x86 and mostly it was the ISA that was really important or what really was different. To understand how stuff works you could even use an imaginery ISA.