Matisyahu's Blog

The combination of drunk people stumbling home from the local pub and people letting of fireworks I decided to have a quiet night in and then go for a walk Sunday night when things are a little bit quieter. On a good side I finally found that annoying soft drink can that was being blowing around on the road last night that was driving me mad – found that along with another tin and put them into my recycling bin. It is amazing how much noise an empty soft drink can can make.

Second day and I’ve been sticking to my meal plan – I had a bottle of soaked chia seeds topped with unsweetened yoghurt (one at breakfast then one at morning tea), some rice and salmon meal that I can heat up in the microwave and then for a snack I had a coffee and an iced coffee (500ml of low fat milk with extra protein along with 80ml of coffee concentrate (no sugar added)). The combination of fibre and protein allows me to keep fuller for longer along with keeping the amount of added sugar to a minimum which avoids blood sugar spikes and feeling hungry shortly after eating something.

Intel has updated their ISA documentation (link) and it is kind of strange that Nova Lake includes support for AVX and APX but for some strange reason Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) is in Panther Lake (and two Xeon models) but not in Nova Lake which seems kind of strange given that I would have expected Nova Lake to build upon the Panther Lake architecture and thus inherit the feature. Unless of course I’m reading it wrong and the architecture listed on the left hand side is the first architecture that will receive it and all subsequent architectures automatically get it since it is already baked in (I assume that is the case given that the title of the table is ‘Recent Instruction Set Extensions / Features Introduction in Intel® 64 and IA-32’ which indicates when it was first introduced). It’ll be interesting to see what the performance will be like when the first crop of Panther Lake laptops are released but the Nova Lake at least for me will be the more interesting because we’ll get to see whether the work done on AVX and APX translates to a sizeable improvement in performance.

Something I do miss is how in the past Microsoft used to have blog posts going into the technical details regarding their kernel, the changes they made and how that impacted the end user. For example, with Windows 7 there was a change in terms of the GDI system which made it more fine grained and scalable which enabled it to be more responsive along with the partial hardware acceleration they implemented as well (as part of WDDM 1.1) which improved the GUI responsiveness when compared to Windows Vista. There was also a change a change in the kernel dispatch that improved its scalability to 256 cores (keeping in mind that that time the idea of 256 cores in a single image was huge). I wish there were more articles regarding the changes being made under the hood – although it may not be popular with the general public it does allow tech enthusiasts such as myself have a greater appreciation regarding what Microsoft is doing below the surface – optimisations, adding support for architectural changes etc.