In other news. A factory fire in Hull, England received nothing more than local news coverage this week. Their product? Hand sanitizer. Turns out that 99% alcohol is really flamible.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/fire-breaks-out-at-hull-factory-and-spreads-to-area-holding-1000-litres-of-hand-sanitiser/ar-BB1oyRi8

I wonder why there’s such a huge disparity in news coverage between these two stories. I guess it’s because the building was evacuated successfully, right?

So “instruction encoding length”.

I don’t think that works though. For something like RISC-V, RV64 has a maximum 32-bit instruction encoding. For x86-64 those original 8-bit intructions still exist, and take up a huge part of the encoding space, cutting the number of n-bit instructions to more like 2^(n-7)

Yes, because 256 memory locations is a bit limiting.

Even then, at what point do you measure it? DDR interface is likely very much narrower than the interfaces between cache levels. Where does the core end and the memory begin?

I expect the engineers are telling the marketing people “No! You can’t do that. You’ll scare everyone that it’s incompatible.”

…but they’re not in 100 percent correlation in this case, and you’re naive if you think they are .

We’ve proved we can do fusion, but we’re still at the stage of just having singular reactions. None of these are power stations with a continuous flow of output, and they’re not even close to being so.

How much of this is climate change and how much is agriculture? Could better agriculture techniques help? Or not needing Iran to be wholly self-sufficient because of sanctions?

…because they are going to a 6 day work week.

Is that when the Country leaves the EU or the people leave the country?

…and punctuation.

Voters may want social care to be on the ballot at the UK general election, but no one seems to be listening.

Yes they are. You just need to be talking to a Liberal Democrat. It’s part of the manifesto.

We do, depending on how you count it.

There’s two major widths in a processor. The data register width and the address bus width, but even that is not the whole story. If you go back to a processor like the 68000, the classic 16-bit processor, it has:

• 32-bit data registers
• 16- bit ALU
• 16-bit data bus
• 32-bit address registers
• 24-bit address bus

Some people called it a 16/32 bit processor, but really it was the 16-bit ALU that classified it as 16-bits.

If you look at a Zen 4 core it has:

• 64-bit data registers
• 512-bit AVX data registers
• 6 x 64-bit integer ALUs
• 4 x 256-bit AVX ALUs
• 2 x 128-bit data bus to DDR5 (dual edge 64-bit)
• ~40-bits of addressable physical RAM

So, what do you want to call this processor?

64-bit (integer width), 128-bit (physical data bus width), 256-bit (widest ALU) or 512-bit (widest register width)? Do you want to multiply those numbers up by the number of ALUs in a core? …by the number of cores on a piece of silicon?

Me, I’d say Zen4 was a 256-bit core, but you could argue any of the above numbers.

Basically, it’s a measurement that lost all meaning so people stopped using it.

We can, but it’s awkward to do so. By having everything work with powers of 2 you don’t need to have everything the same size, but can still pack things in memory efficiently.

If your registers were 48bits long, you can use it to store 6 bytes, or 3 short ints, but only one int with 16-bits going unused. If they are powers of two in size, you can always fit smaller things in them with no wasted space.

I count at least 7 points on that star.

…the Swedish lithium-ion battery maker couldn’t deliver on time on a long-term supply contract for battery cells agreed with BMW in 2020.

Korea’s Samsung SDI will step in to fill the gap created at BMW by the cancellation.

So, before anyone uses this as fodder for the “EV sales are dropping narrative”, this is a case of company A not delivering on time, so company B is used instead because BMW can’t wait.

Two dimensions is 100% better than one.

Measured on a different axis.

You can have authoritarian left Stalin’s Russia) and authoritarian right (Nazi Germany). You can have liberal (i.e. non-authoritarian) left and right too.

It’s clichéd, but the political compass explains the concept, but it’s still only one extra dimension. It’s still far better than just left Vs right.

The labels get confusing especially between countries, but left and right are normally viewed as being economic policy classifications, but you can have authoritarians on right and left and all need to be fought.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that left mean anti-authoritarian. Left or right is an economic stance, and is orthogonal to beliefs surrounding government rights Vs population rights.