The Circus: The Kahuna-Gordon Messages: Part 12

ALPHARETTA, Georgia -- A few months ago, Professor Gordon and Kahuna had yet another of their notorious conversations. This time, it became a highly unorthodox discussion about microarchitecture, implicating flora and fauna in a manner that would have been frowned upon by Subrata Dasgupta, author of that definitive work, The Design and Description of Computer Architectures^[1].

This is a work of utter buffoonery and certainly not intended to be an affront to Professor Dasgupta, without whose works, Kahuna would have been a lesser clown.

Read on to find out what would happen if large clowns left unsupervised, designed processors.

Gordon : In other news, my daughter is attempting 
         speech synthesis.
Kahuna : Again? X-(
Gordon : Indeed.
Gordon : She executes for{int i=1; i<=10; i++} quite
         regularly, especially whilst climbing 
         stairs. 
Kahuna : #@$@%@!@#@!$%#$% 
Gordon : What, you prefer VB? X-( 
Kahuna : I'd prefer if you didn't teach your 
         daughter to code at this age X-( 
Gordon : Heh heh, be thankful it wasn't MOV AX,0 etc
         :-P
Kahuna : I will perform an LDIR^[2] on your person 
         by Z80 assembly X-(
Gordon : Now, now, now.
         HALT.
Kahuna : RSET.
Gordon : JNZ LAKE X-(
Kahuna : LD CACTUS.
         PUSH CACTUS.
Gordon : [GUFFAW]
Kahuna : Heh heh.
Gordon : That would probably have caused a cache 
         miss X-(
Kahuna : You think?
Kahuna : I can just imagine not finding the cactus 
         in main memory and a foray into the Arizona
         desert X-(
Gordon : Exactly.
Kahuna : This would incur a delay of several clock
         cycles X-(
Gordon : You could attempt a prefetch X-(
Kahuna : Are you suggesting that I cache cacti to 
         avoid going off-chip?
Gordon : Well the branch prediction may compensate.
Kahuna : If it predicts the wrong branch, it might 
         fetch redwoods. This could cause large 
         scale caching problems X-(
Gordon : I see your locale is en-US X-(
Kahuna : Indeed. Flagstaff, AZ to be precise.
Gordon : If your locale was en-ZA you might have 
         fetched a baobab.
Kahuna : #$@#$@#$ You will note said baobab caches 
         water X-(
Gordon : Indeed, large amounts of it too.
Kahuna : So you're suggesting we replace the L2 with
         a baobab?
Gordon : This is a possibility, yes.  You might 
         attract vultures, though.
Kahuna : Said vultures could introduce pipeline 
         stalls.
Gordon : In local news a clown zoo had lost its 
         vulture and was issuing instructions to 
         notify police if [we] saw a vulture flying
         by X-(
Kahuna : Yes, all we need now is a vulture flyby X-(
Kahuna : I wonder why they never thaught [sic] 
         processor design in this manner.
Gordon : Judging by that last sentence they'd have 
         been too busy checking spellings X-(
Kahuna : I will lock you up in baobab if you're not
         careful. "A very large, hollow boab [sic] 
         south of Derby, Western Australia was used 
         in the 1890s as a lockup for Aboriginal 
         prisoners on their way to Derby for 
         sentencing. The Boab Prison Tree still 
         stands and is now a tourist attraction."^[3]
Gordon : You appear to have branched X-(
Kahuna : It was just a look-aside during translation
         X-(
Gordon : Someone should buffer you.
Kahuna : A staging latch could be used for this
         purpose X-(
Gordon : That's quite static.
Kahuna : Well as long as it's fast enough.
Kahuna : You will note it takes a large CF to 
         explain microarchitecture in terms of 
         cacti, baobabs and vultures X-(
Kahuna : By Subrata Dasgupta X-(
Gordon : Indeed. A hyena or two will add some 
         flavor.
Kahuna : I was thinking of a fossa.
Gordon : Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Don't remind me of that
         clown X-(
Kahuna : Indeed. That book was hideous X-(
Gordon : To this day I have no idea what he was 
         trying to say X-(
Kahuna : Indeed. The sentences were so long that you
         lost track of the subject and the predicate
         when you got to the end.

Professor Dasgupta's perfectly structured, elegantly mathematical English was lost on undergraduates desperately short of cache memory to buffer the entirety of his statements. Screaming and gnashing of teeth was not uncommon during CS301.

Gordon : Indeed, perhaps it was trying to explain 
         TLBs X-(
Kahuna : I think the whole book was a corrupted TLB.
Gordon : [GUFFAW]
Gordon : You're suggesting bad SRAM by Hyundai.
Kahuna : I'm suggesting that Dasgupta got his 
         pipelines a twist. It's a good thing he 
         didn't teach surgery for instance X-(
Kahuna : Argggggggggghhhhh! You will examine.
Gordon : BTBOTP, he looks like Cuthbert Calculus.
Gordon : He's in the Institute of Cognitive Science 
         of all places X-(
Kahuna : He's written a novel as well X-(
Gordon : Oh? X-(
Kahuna : Just imagine reading that X-(
Gordon : Perhaps that's what we had in the library 
         X-(
Kahuna : He's written more than one. Probably no one
         understood it. Or more likely, survived to
         tell the tale.
Gordon : [GUFFAW]

In all fairness, the most boring book of all time is Michael J Earl's Management Strategies for Information Technology^[4]. A bane of college students everywhere, the slim volume with its characteristic dark blue cover is known to induce coma with a single page. But, we digress.

Gordon : Perhaps he may have a chance now that 
         Sidney Sheldon is out of the way X-(
Kahuna : Yes, the general public is itching to read
         about his description of how staging 
         latches help during prefetch X-(
Gordon : :-P
Kahuna : You can almost feel the suspense when he
         describes a pipeline stall X-(
Gordon : You appear to be a great fan of his works.
Kahuna : Yes, I still remember the chapter on 
         microcode X-(
Kahuna : It took me years to get over it.
Gordon : Heh, heh.

The next day, buffoonery continued.

Kahuna : Zap() Clobber()
Gordon : Vulture()
Kahuna : A deceased wildebeest will sort you out.
Gordon : Assault with carcass? X-(
Kahuna : Indeed.
Kahuna : Good lord: "A group of vultures is 
         occasionally called a venue in literature. 
         When circling in the air, a group of 
         vultures is called a kettle."^[5]
Gordon : A kettle? By Russell Hobbs X-(
Kahuna : Indeed X-(
Gordon : And literature? By S Dasgupta X-(
         What form of literature has references to
         vultures? X-(
Kahuna : Indeed.  Said clown would have described 
         the venue of vultures attending the 
         processor in quite unnecessary detail X-(
Kahuna : However, I'm still not quite clear what 
         role these vultures play in the 
         microarchitecture. Garbage collection? X-(
Gordon : Garbage collection.
Kahuna : And you propose to use elephants to manage 
         the data bus? Especially if your TLB 
         predicts we need a redwood.
Gordon : For data compression, yes.
Kahuna : Who's going to fetch the data? X-(
Gordon : Carrier pigeons.
Kahuna : Carrier pigeons? X-(
Gordon : Do you have a better suggestion? X-(
Kahuna : Let me get this right: we have pigeons
         bringing in the data from off-chip storage,
         then there's a ring of elephants around the
         baobab who stomp on the incoming data to
         compress it?
Gordon : Yes, and vultures cleaning up any 
         leftovers.
Kahuna : This compression appears to be lossy X-(
Gordon : The hyenas take care of interrupts.
Kahuna : By howling?
Gordon : Yup.
Gordon : Unless you get laughing hyenas, that is.
Kahuna : In which case? X-(
Gordon : They laugh.
Kahuna : This might annoy the elephants X-(
Gordon : This is all taken care of by the lions 
         manning the control bus.
Kahuna : Oh, there are lions as well? X-(
Gordon : Yes. This worries you?
Kahuna : No, I'm just wondering how the data is
         decompressed.
Gordon : That's a patented process.
Gordon : I forgot to mention the zebras that provide
         disk striping.
Kahuna : No doubt the elephants blow the compressed 
         data back up
Gordon : I cannot comment on that.
Kahuna : You're attempting to hide a patently lossy
         compression method X-(
Kahuna : These zebras operate on RAID 1+0 or 5?
Gordon : 1+0.
Kahuna : These are high-performance zebras, BTBOTP.
Gordon : Indeed.
Kahuna : Is there a secretary bird in this 
         architecture?
Gordon : How did you guess?
Kahuna : Someone has to provide a clock signal X-(
Gordon : Er no, that's the cuckoo.
Kahuna : And pray tell what the secretary bird does?
Gordon : The secretary bird handles the storage
         abstraction layer.
Gordon : You just hand over the data and it's filed 
         on any available medium.
Kahuna : And the underlying zebras handle 
         redundancy?
Gordon : Exactly.
Gordon : And then there're the fireflies that read
         optical media.
Kahuna : X-( Yellow-ray technology?
Gordon : Er no, they were genetically modified to 
         glow blu(e). We try to adhere to standards 
         wherever possible.
Kahuna : There is no such standard X-(
Gordon : Haven't you heard of Blu-ray? X-(
Kahuna : I believe they're still bitching over that 
         and HD-DVD X-(
Gordon : Indeed; however, Blu-ray seems to be 
         winning.
Kahuna : Your alliances are noted X-(
Kahuna : We will need some adders to man the FPU.
Gordon : Did I mention we use water from the baobab 
         for cooling?
Kahuna : Er no, but I would imagine this to be 
         sensible.
Kahuna : Doesn't this architecture need monkeys?
Gordon : No they're unpredictable.
Kahuna : Yes, we wouldn't want this to become like
         parliament.
Gordon : I will now abscond for a bit to pay the 
         rent.
Kahuna : Why not hand it over to the secretary bird?

Sometime later...

Gordon : Douglas()
Kahuna : Gah.
Kahuna : Did you go off-chip? X-(
Gordon : Yes, I was peripheral.
Kahuna : I must ask the lions not to leave you to 
         your own devices.
Kahuna : On that note, I will swap myself out.
Gordon : To hibernate?
Kahuna : Indeed.
Gordon : Someone should shut you down if you ask me.
Kahuna : Bah, you've been trying for years.

Wait, there's more!

Kahuna : Hyena.laugh() elephant.stomp()
Gordon : By PKZIP.
Kahuna : At least PKZIP has a known inverse function
         X-(
Gordon : :-P
Gordon : When was the last time you recovered 
         anything squashed by an elephant then?
Kahuna : I haven't; this is why I'm waiting to see 
         your patent X-(
Gordon : Heh, heh, heh.
Kahuna : Your whole architecture could fall apart 
         X-(

On that ominous note, we take your leave. Gordon's new architecture will be detailed in the Jungle Book, coming soon to CS301 near you. Naturally, no flora or fauna was harmed in the course of this production.