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Last active November 21, 2021 19:59
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EasyPerf 21 November 2021 - Bryan Cantrill
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easyPerf21Nov20201.md

EasyPerf 21 November 2021 - Bryan Cantrill

  • Performance engineering is largely debuging others' code
  • Denard Scaling - as transisters get smaller, power per area stays constant
  • Few use cases for multiple sockets.
  • Hesitant to speculate Brendan Greg's limit estimate of around 1000 cores by 2030.
  • Lots of work to do on network interconnect.
  • FPGAs intially oversold their benefits - need to be open source Claire Wolfe's work
  • Proprietary compilers suck. Especially Electronic Design Autmoation
  • KiCAD - LLVM Circuit IR Compilers and Tools - Bluespec
  • Concerns about being stuck with too many/few parts with supply chain mess. Especially bad in older process nodes. More software emulating old components.
  • Cortex M0
  • Borderline malpractice not using embedded Rust.
  • Internal Rust embedded operating system - Hubris.
  • Market likely to crash soon - but it will be an abrupt failure that is hard to predict timing.
  • "Low Code" like Airtable democratises automation - but it is a footgun when you use that abstraction at scale. Like Excel macros.
  • Speculative execution is turning into a security nightmare and power drain. We have to watch the economics.
  • M1 is a cheap, fast, cool, long-lived battery life. Amazing software/hardware co-design. Secrecy bites Apple - they have huge staffing overhead by not being able to outsource that hardware/software co-design.
  • Rod Canion at Compaq - UEFI is a shackle. We have to be weary of bad abstractions in the industry.
  • WASM/WASI could be a useful bytecode outside just web applications - edge computing/IOT ...
  • How do you plan about software observability? DTRACE had to be explained to SUN executives. Debugability is important. Build tooling as you go so you can measure/inspect.
  • Memory disambiguation is hard - Rust is helping give compilers more information to optimize with.
  • Open Source Firmware Conference
  • Fushia OS - shocked at number of people working on it at Google.
  • zCore - kernel in Rust by RISC-V folks.
  • Venture Capital (A16z) is largely blind to hardware. They are missing hardware/software co-design innovation investment.
  • Dell, HPE, supermicro stagnant. Dell places blame instead of fixing their bugs.
  • The Soul of a New Machine
  • Embrace history - great market research.
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