Phil Park
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parkbot.bsky.social
Phil Park
@parkbot.bsky.social
530 followers 130 following 340 posts
Burrito scientist, AMD Infinity Fabric performance/architecture. @philparkbot in the Bad Place. Personal account. He/Him.

📍British Columbia

https://linktr.ee/philpark
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parkbot.bsky.social
Supernintendo Chalmers: GOOD LORDI WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THERE? Skinner: NEW PRODIGY SPECS RELEASED Chalmers: SPECS THAT CLAIM IT CAN BEAT AN UNRELEASED PART BY OVER AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, WITH MEMORY SPEEDS THAT DON'T EXIST, IN CAPACITIES THAT DON'T EXIST, BY A COMPANY THAT HAS YET TO TAPE OUT A PART? Skinner: YES Chalmers: MAY I SEE IT? Skinner: NO
November 13, 2025 at 2:54 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
EU killed the iRobot deal

@foxes.bsky.social

media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-A...
Amazon and iRobot agree to terminate pending acquisition Amazon's proposed acquisition of iRobot has no path to regulatory approval in the European Union, preventing Amazon and iRobot from moving forward together-a loss for consumers, competition, and innovation. SEATTLE and BEDFORD, Mass., Jan. 29, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) announced that they have entered into a mutual agreement to terminate their previously announced acquisition agreement, originally signed on August 4, 2022, under which Amazon would have acquired iRobot for cash consideration. This deal would have allowed Amazon to invest in continued innovation by iRobot and support iRobot in lowering prices on products customers already love. The companies released the following statements today about the decision:
October 29, 2025 at 7:34 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
A lot of people rightfully complain that x86 is complex and ugly, but this quote from Linus Torvalds on x86-64 vs IA64 was also revealing
Quote from Linus Torvalds: "[Intel] threw out all the good parts of the x86 because people thought those parts were ugly. They aren't ugly, they're the 'charming oddity' that makes it do well."
September 22, 2025 at 8:29 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
One fact I had memory holed goes back to the classic CISC vs RISC debate. My recollection for IA64’s justification was that Intel believed CPUs were getting too complicated and that they wanted a new ISA. In reality it was because they believed CISC could not scale or be competitive with RISC!
“When the IA64 project was started it was perceived that the performance of RISC machines would outstrip that of [Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC)] machines. ... They felt that they could get higher performance with a [Very Large Instruction Word (VLIW)] architecture than they could with a CISC architecture.” - Dave Cutler, "A History of Modern 64-bit Computing"
September 22, 2025 at 8:25 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
Love this photo

www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
Protest banner at Incheon airport of a person in a Trump mask wearing an ICE shirt, with a bag of cash and a rifle. The banner reads, “We’re friends! Aren’t we?”
September 12, 2025 at 7:44 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
Hazy skies from wildfires in the Pacific NW
A picture of the hazy skies in metro Vancouver due to wildfires in northern BC
September 5, 2025 at 3:39 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
Is Todd Austin running for office? 😆#TeamLittleEndian
Post by Todd Austin on LinkedIn The TECH NEWS doesn't want to talk about it, but today EVERY computing system-every last one—is LITTLE ENDIAN. In the dark ages of computer architecture, there were big-endian and little-endian architectures, and it was TOTAL CHAOS. Through the leadership of myself and other HIGHLY TALENTED computer architects, it became clear that BIG ENDIAN was a TOTAL DISASTER, confusing, slow, and frankly a disgrace to the world of computing. Eventually, our sage leadership FIXED it, unified it, and made memory systems BEAUTIFUL again. Last year at HotChips, a very famous computer architect came up to me (with tears in their eyes) and said, "Thank you, professor, for bringing peace and harmony to our memory systems." Today everyone knows it: computer architects LOVE little endian. But now l've just learned something SHOCKING-maybe the biggest cover-up in the HISTORY of technology. The INTERNET-yes, the whole thing—is COMPLETELY BIG-ENDIAN! After all the tremendous work we did, shadowy standards committees and so-called networking "experts" quietly locked in BIG-ENDIAN as "network byte order." It's a GLOBAL DARK NET conspiracy designed to undermine our BEAUTIFUL memory systems and to bring back confusion, chaos, and misaligned data. We must now come together ONCE AGAIN TO BRING ORDER TO THE CHAOS. We must END big endian once and for all. We must make the Internet little endian and make it STRONGER than ever before. BIG-ENDIAN is for LOSERS-LITTLE-ENDIAN is for WINNERS. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
September 2, 2025 at 5:52 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
I love this post by Todd Austin equating running a kitchen to a modern out of order microprocessor, especially with the inclusion of precise interrupts, prefetch, and power gating.
Todd Austin • • 1st S. Jack Hu Collegiate Professor of CSE at UofM... I am a COMPUTER ARCHITECT, which means I design computers. I was trained at a great school (UW-Madison), and I worked in industry (Intel) before I became a professor (University of Michigan). Despite these rarefied experiences, I first came to know computer architecture in the KITCHEN, working for 4 years first as a COOK. Let me explain. As a cook, you are the control logic of a complex multi-issue machine, which operates with many of the optimizations found in today's CPUs: IN-ORDER FETCH: The meal orders come in-order from the wait staff, and this order must be preserved. OUT-OF-ORDER ISSUE: With a big menu, the latency to cook items will vary greatly, from fast salads to medium-latency burgers to long-latency steaks. Cooks will scan the upcoming orders and "issue" long latency items first, medium later, and short last, to make sure all items finish at roughly the same time. IN-ORDER RETIREMENT: Importantly, the meal orders have to finish IN-ORDER. Wait staff will get very annoyed if any out-of-order completion occurs—no one wants to see the table that sat down after them get their food first! BTW, Tapas restaurants break this rule, which greatly improves the efficiency of their kitchens. What is the computer architecture dual to the tapas restaurant? PREFETCH: Occasionally, someone from the wait staff will run into the kitchen and yell "BUS!" (typically with the same vigor as someone running into a beach bar and yelling "TSUNAMI!"), which means 50+ additional orders are coming to your line. When this happens, you turn on all the stoves and steak burners and start frying staples, etc. CACHING and SPECULATION: Many of the "specials" for the night are pre-cooked and kept in an oven (cache). This is optimizing the common case, since these popular meals take seconds to make. Often, if there are specials left over at the end of the night (mispeculation), they are donated to local food shelters. NON-DETERMINISTIC LATENCY: Efficient architectures try to avoid all non-deterministic latencies, since they stymie schedulers and gum up the works. Kitchens operate the same way: everything is prepped to give deterministic cook times. Once, I put a steak on a grill shared with the short-order cook window. Later, when I checked on my steak, it was gone... I confronted the short-order cook, and he said, "Do you want to fight me for it?" A non-deterministic latency made my line a mess that night! PRECISE INTERRUPTS: When the shift changes, the incoming cook will negotiate which order to transition on. The working cook will finish all their orders, after which the new cook takes over. This is called a precise interrupt, and it is similar to how out-of-order processors effectuate a process switch. POWER GATING: Kitchens are HOT. If stoves are not needed, they are powered down! Besides architecture training, working as a cook is a great way to start a career. All later jobs you will have will be MUCH EASIER and LESS DANGEROUS! #computerarchitecture
August 24, 2025 at 7:15 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
I’ve lived in Texas, Colorado, Ionho, Nosava, Ilana, and Ventanr.
Asking GPT-5 to draw me a map of the United States GPT-5’s map of the US
August 10, 2025 at 12:12 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
PCIe 8.0 has been announced, so a reminder that since Gen 3, the link transfer rate is 2^(PCIe gen), and from there you can derive the bandwidth for any link width.

e.g. Gen 8 x16 = 256 GT/s * 16 lanes / 8 bits/B * 2 directions = 1024 GB/s = 1 TB/s

www.businesswire.com/news/home/20...
PCIe (bidirectional) bandwidths for various link widths across generations
August 6, 2025 at 12:32 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
Not to brag, but I edit text and clean my apartment with vim
Vim cleaner, not to be confused with the world class text editor
August 1, 2025 at 12:46 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
The Magny Cours directory implementation was interesting by reserving a slice of the L3 rather than having its own dedicated structure, and it looks like this was done for cost/reuse purposes - you can use the same die as the desktop part.
Where Do We Put the HT Assist Probe Filter? Q: Where do we store probe filter entries without adding a large on-chip probe filter RAM which is not used in a 1P desktop system? A: Steal 1MB of 6MB L3 cache per die in "Magny-Cours" systems Implementation in fast SRAM (L3) minimizes - Access latency - Port occupancy of read-modify-write operations - Indirection latency for cache-to-cache transfers
July 15, 2025 at 4:43 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
So Rambus is still around I guess
Campus sign showing that Rambus is nearby
June 6, 2025 at 4:14 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
I needed IT to fix my laptop, so I got to visit the AMD Vancouver campus
AMD building entrance Sign showing the companies at the 2930/2940 Broadway Tech Centre: BCLC, Worley, Worley Chemetics, Worley Consulting, and AMD Green area of the campus
June 6, 2025 at 4:13 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
White paper on the UALink 200G v1.0 spec by Nathan Kalyanasundharam

ualinkconsortium.org/wp-content/u...
UALink features and goals
June 5, 2025 at 11:52 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
This sounded like something @srasgon.bsky.social would say, and it turns out it was.

ca.investing.com/news/transcr...
Stacy Rasgon, Analyst, Bernstein: a smaller wafer size. Got it. Got it. I guess along those lines, like, does China fit into all of this? And and and, clearly, you guys have been impacted by sort of increasing waves of export controls, which have not been all that fun. China was still buying a lot of especially those kinds of of of tools. Sometimes it's it's unclear to me who's actually doing the buying in China. I guess just how do we think about the general environment in China, the geopolitical situation? I always worry, like, what's the risk of further export controls? I mean, could could our, you know, our new president wake up one morning and, you know, after eating a bad burrito or something and decide to to cut everything off. I mean, this is something I I wish I don't think it's likely, but I wish I could say I thought that risk was non zero, and I'm not sure that it is. So, like, how does how does Lem think about those kinds of risks?
June 1, 2025 at 3:02 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
Going through photo archives and I forgot how gorgeous my ex-gf’s cat was with his heterochromia. #cats #catsky #catsofbluesky
My ex’s cat Samran and his beautiful eyes Sammy chilling in an empty HEB water pack Sammy and Frff. RIP to both of them
May 16, 2025 at 3:30 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
It looks like someone is doing something (and more Dems should do this)
Tweet by Sen Chris Van Hollen: “I've been clear: if President Bukele doesn't want to meet here in D.C., then I intend to go to El Salvador this week to check on Kilmar Abrego Garcia's condition and discuss his release. Kilmar was illegally ABDUCTED and deported by the Trump Admin. He must be brought home NOW.”
April 15, 2025 at 8:32 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
Me, Rob, Sean, and Abe from Zeke Sean, Rob, Donny from Zeke, me
March 29, 2025 at 6:49 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
I highly recommend reading this fantastic interview with Zen’s dad Mike Clark. He reiterates what my fellow microarchitecture nerds have known about the relationship between ISA and power consumption (the internet overblows it)
CASEY: You will often hear "people on the internet" say that ARM as an ISA is better for low power than x64. People like me who study ISAs tend to be skeptical of this claim. As a hardware designer, are there any specific things about the x64 ISA that you find difficult to deal with for low-power designs? MIKE: Having spent my career working on x86, I might have a bias here! I do think each ISA has its own quirks that influence some of the microarchitecture. But at the base level, we can build low-power x86 designs as well as ARM can, and ARM can build high frequency, high performance designs as well as x86 can. None of the quirks are really limiting you on the microarchitecture. The reality is that the markets we've been targeting have been different, so they've driven the architectures to optimize for different design points. ARM is in much lower power markets where x86 hasn't had the market share to chase. On the x86 side, the higher performance / higher frequency devices are the established market that our devices have to compete in, so that's where our design focus is. We could build the same Zen microarchitecture with an ARM ISA on top instead. We could deliver the same performance per watt. We don't view the ISA as a fundamental input to the design as far as power or performance. CASEY: So the memory model, whether the instructions are variable length, those sorts of things don't factor in? None of the differences are big enough to matter? MIKE: No. It may take a little bit more microarchitectural work for us to account for stronger memory order on the x86 side, but of course the software has to account for the weaker memory ordering on the ARM side. So there are tradeoffs. Variable length instructions are harder than fixed length, but we've created techniques like the uop cache, and it also gives us better density overall by having smaller instructions. x86 can put more work into each instruction byte, so we can have denser binaries and increase performance that way. So these are all just tradeoffs in the microarchitecture. They're not fundamental issues for delivering performance per watt at the end of the day.
March 25, 2025 at 2:02 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
😆

Polis is here, if you want to tag him.
Bluesky account of Jared Pllis, Governor of Colorado
March 24, 2025 at 2:53 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
This Change My View Reddit post on Mahmoud Khalil by a self-described centrist lib is the worst thing I’ve read this morning.

www.reddit.com/r/changemyvi...
CMV: The loud, principled opposition to the treatment of Mahmoud Khalil is tremendously counterproductive for opponents of Trump Recently I've seen a fairly loud social media outcry over the prospect of Mahmoud Khalil being targeted for his "speech" regarding Israel/Palestine. My view, is that this is a deeply counter persuasive manner of convincing people that supporting the Trump admin is a poor choice. Why do I think this? I personally believe that most people are not Constitutional maximalists, including those who are making this argument. A compelling analogue to me, is the other side's 2A maximalism; I'm positive almost all Khalil supporters would argue, that wife beaters and teenagers threatening to shoot up schools, should not be allowed to acquire of maintain firearms; nor should we normalize a gun in every classroom as the solution to school shooters. I know we've grown up identifying America as possessing a tradition of protest; this is more palatable when considered in the context of social times when minorities were institutionally identified as second class citizens with less rights. Now, we are attempting to apply this to green card holder, who is a leader of groups (at least to the average citizen) conflated with behaviors like shutting down classrooms at universities, threatening/intimidating Jews, shutting down highways with human chains, and preaching harm against America explicitly - all in the name of supporting groups that are equally genocidal in the other direction towards Jews! Those citing, "he was not charged with a crime!" are less persuasive as well - the casual onlooker will just conclude, "well, they have stopped prosecuting shoplifting, fare evasion, and are even freeing violent criminals w/o bail - why would this be any different?" Now, I am a centrist lib, and will absolutely not support Republicans, and think there are a million better, more persuasive reasons to oppose Trump. But I see this type of messaging and think, how does th…
March 15, 2025 at 5:03 PM
parkbot.bsky.social
I just saw this
Tweet from @iHateShaun I keep seeing this on here but AppleTV says it's 45 minutes and there's so much left to happen I NEED it to be 76 minutes Reply by @BenStiller It is 76 minutes
March 14, 2025 at 5:30 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
I was searching for this exact sentiment and reddit delivered.
Post in r/startrekmemes In Star Trek Discovery (S1E4), Captain Gabriel Lorca mentions Elon Musk as a great man. Star Trek fans later said this reference aged poorly. However, it actually is great foreshadowing that Captain Lorca was the bad guy all along. Quote from show: “Alongside the Wright brothers, Elon Musk, Zefram Cochrane?”
March 13, 2025 at 2:15 AM
parkbot.bsky.social
I knew his name sounded familiar. He primaried the House Majority Leader (Eric Cantor) in 2014 and won and then lost in the 2018 wave
From Brat’s Wikipedia page: Brat came to national prominence when he defeated the U.S. House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, in the 2014 Republican primary in Virginia's 7th congressional district. His primary victory, which he achieved with the support of the Tea Party movement, made Brat the first primary challenger to oust a sitting House Majority Leader since the position's creation in 1899. 11 Brat went on to win the 2014 general election and was re-elected to Congress in 2016. During his congressional tenure, Brat was known as a conservative Republican and a member of the Freedom Caucus. He was defeated by Democrat Abigail Spanberger in the 2018 election. In January 2019, Brat was named dean of the Liberty University School of Business.
March 12, 2025 at 4:51 PM