Friday, July 1, 2016

The Sentry Branch Predictor Spec: A Fairy Tale, by John Chu

(Fantasy Technology) An account of a failed design for a superscalar ball-bearing-based computer. (5,980 words)

Rating: 1, Needs Improvement
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, by appeared in the July 2016 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine (Issue 118), published .

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

This isn't a story at all, nor is it particularly interesting. Anyone who has taken a class on advanced microprocessor architecture design or read a text like Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, by Hennessy and Patterson will find the description of the branch predictor very familiar.

And crushingly dull.

There is the hint of a story in the footnotes, but it's only a hint.

3 comments (may contain spoilers):

  1. I would have described it as a very understated love story

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  2. Yep, I crashed out of this one - no idea what it was meant to be achieving.

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