Microarch Club Dan Mangum

Kay Li joins to talk about custom hardware used in high-frequency trading, development workflows for FPGA and ASIC design, and why verification has become a bottleneck in the design process. We also discuss SiLogy, the startup Kay founded with Paul Kim to improve the design workflow, including their experience applying to and going through YCombinator, their initial target market, and how the platform could evolve over time.
Kay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kay-li-84924128b/
Kay on Twitter: https://twitter.com/silikayli
Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/111

Rick Altherr joins to talk about working on hardware performance analysis tools at Apple during the PowerPC to x86 transition, building flight control software for internet satellites at Google, discovering vulnerabilities in baseboard management controllers, and much more. We also spend an extended portion of the conversation on Rick's current work in quantum computing, including comparing and contrasting with classical computing, and examining some of the challenges of interfacing with these machines today.
Rick's Site: https://www.kc8apf.net/
Rick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxshift/
Rick on Mastodon: https://social.treehouse.systems/@mxshift
Rick on GitHub: https://github.com/mx-shift
Rick's Mentoring Sign-Up: https://calendly.com/mxshift
Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/110

Matt Godbolt joins to talk about early microprocessors, working in the games industry, performance optimization on modern x86 CPUs, and the compute infrastructure that powers the financial trading industry. We also discuss Matt's work on bringing YouTube to early mobile phones, and the origin story of Compiler Explorer, Matt's well-known open source project and website.
Matt's Site: https://xania.org/
Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/godbolt/
Matt on X: https://twitter.com/mattgodbolt
Matt on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@mattgodbolt
Matt on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mattgodbolt.bsky.social
Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/101

Nathanael Huffman joins to talk about the magic of FPGAs, the role they play in domains ranging from medical imaging to data centers, and how software development principles can be applied to logic design. We also discuss how Nathanael and the team at Oxide Computer Company built a new rack-scale computer while working remotely, and what exactly happens when it powers on and boots up.
Nathanael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanael-huffman-5128024a/
Nathanael on X: https://twitter.com/SyntheticGate
Nathanael on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@SyntheticGate
Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/100

Robert Garner joins for a fascinating tour of the last 50 years of computing, told through his experiences working alongside pioneers of the industry on projects like the optical mouse, the Xerox STAR workstation, Sun Microsystems’ SPARC instruction set architecture, and many more. We also discuss Robert’s work preserving and restoring systems at the Computer History Museum, and his upcoming book on the technical history of Ethernet.
Robert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertgarner/
Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/
Detailed Show Notes: https://microarch.club/episodes/11

Thomas Sohmers joins to discuss dropping out of high school at age 17 to start a chip company, lessons from the successes and failures of past processor architectures, the history of VLIW, and the new AI hardware appliances he and his team are building at Positron AI.
Thomas on X: https://twitter.com/trsohmers
Thomas' Site: https://www.trsohmers.com/
Show Notes
Welcome Thomas Sohmers (00:01:22)Growing Up Around Computers (00:03:13)Digging Beneath the Software (00:05:56)Learning Python, C, and Arduino C (00:07:05) https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/Learning About the Thiel Fellowship (00:07:44) https://thielfellowship.org/Starting Research at MIT at age 14 (00:09:24)Dropping out of High School and Starting Thiel Fellowship at age 17 (00:10:36)MIT ISN Lab (00:11:09) https://isn.mit.edu/Evaluating ARM Processors for High Performance Computing (00:11:28) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_familyARM Calxeda Processor (00:11:38) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calxedahttps://www.zdnet.com/article/what-the-death-of-calxeda-means-for-the-future-of-microservers/Scaling Out Low Power Processors for Data Center Compute (00:12:27)Incorporating REX Computing (00:13:42) http://rexcomputing.com/https://fortune.com/2015/07/21/rex-computing/Facebook and the Open Compute Project (00:14:18) https://www.opencompute.org/Deciding Against Arm (00:14:49)ARMv8 (00:15:12) https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm/armv8Deciding to Design a New Architecture (00:16:26)Multiflow (00:18:23) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiflowGood Architecture Ideas from the Past (00:18:35)Thomas' Talk at Stanford (00:18:59) https://youtu.be/ki6jVXZM2XURISC vs. CISC Debate (00:19:37) https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/risc/risccisc/SPARC Instruction Set (00:20:04) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCThe Importance of History (00:20:58)RISC Came Before CISC (00:23:08)CDC 6600 (00:23:20) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600Load-Store Architecture (00:23:53) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load–store_architectureIBM System/360 (00:24:02) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360PowerPC (00:24:29) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPCVLIW (00:25:02) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_long_instruction_wordELI-512 and Josh Fisher (00:25:05) https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800046.801649https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_FisherFloating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS) (00:26:45) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_Point_SystemsMultiflow Compiler (00:26:52) https://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdfInstruction Level Parallelism (00:27:33) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction-level_parallelismIntel Itanium (00:28:20) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ItaniumItanium is not a VLIW Architecture (00:29:04)Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computer (EPIC) (00:29:22) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computingx86 and Pentium (00:30:18) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PentiumImpact of Branch Prediction and Caching on Determinism (00:31:34) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictorhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_cacheWhy Itanium Failed (00:32:27)REX's NEO Architecture (00:35:29) http://rexcomputing.com/#neoarchHard Real-Time Determinism (00:35:41)Scratchpad Memory (00:35:54) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratchpad_memoryRemoving Memory Management (TLB, MMU, etc.) (00:36:18) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_lookaside_bufferhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_unitALU, FPU, and Register Files (00:37:14) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_logic_unithttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_unithttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_fileBenefits of Removing Implicit Caching Layers (00:38:30)VLIW in Signal Processing (00:39:51) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processorVLIW Won in a Silent Way (00:40:49)Original Reason for Hardware-Managed Caching (00:41:26)Impact of VLIW and Software-Managed Memory on Compil