What's new in CPUs since the 80s? (2015)

The constant widening of the SIMD registers is an interesting trend to watch. MMX started off as 64-bit, and now AVX-512 is 8 times that. With many cores and a couple of SIMD units in each core, aren't CPUs becoming ever more suitable to handle graphic workloads that were once reasonable only for GPUs?

Interesting point about L1 cache sizes and the relationship between page size > Also, first-level caches are usually limited by the page size times the associativity of the cache. If the cache is smaller than that, the bits used to index into the cache are the same regardless if whether you're looking at the virtual address or the physical address, so you don't have to do a virtual to physical translation before indexing into the cache. If the cache is…

It's strange the extent to which programming interview questions reflect an 80s view of the cost of operations, particularly the overabundance of linked list and binary tree questions. Cache misses ain't free and memory scans are relatively cheap after you do the initial lookup.

No, the 80s were not 8b. The 68000 was 32b. The 8088 used in the IBM PC was 16b and then quickly changed to 32b with the 80386 in the PC/AT. The Apple II started at 8b but changed to 16b with the IIgs. I didn't see superscalar mentioned. But I saw some close synonyms; so I'm good. However, I didn't see μop caches. The x86 tax is pretty small in 2017 and it was pretty expensive in the 80s…