The Internet: Bringing People Together

If you look around the Internet long enough, you'll find yourself. Or in my case, myself will find me. Which is better, because I'm lazy. I mean busy. Busy!

Case in point: Sean Handley is a computer science student at Swansea University. He has a general blog and has just started a blog about his dissertation — the algebraic specification of multicore and hyperthreaded microprocessors. He's having a pirate-themed birthday party in a few weeks.

He discovered my Island of Pizza story, thought it was linkworthy, and I noticed it in my referrer logs.

Pirates! Parallelism! I'm beside myself. (For an ocean-width definition of "beside".)

Sean, if you'd like some information about modern-day microprocessor architecture — as opposed to the inevitably out-of-date stuff you'll learn in school — I recommend the paper The Microarchitecture of the Pentium® 4 Processor from the Q1'2001 Intel Technology Journal. It's only five years old, not fifteen! :)

The paper doesn't go into excruciating detail, but believe me … you don't want the excruciating detail. That's things like a 250-page manual to describe just how branch prediction works. Around the office we like to say "Computers are Too Complicated™".