Skip to content

Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale Logo Fediverso

Social Forum federato con il resto del mondo. Non contano le istanze, contano le persone

La solita associazione filosofica si è fatta una locandina in proprio (wow!

Uncategorized
19 4 7

Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
  • Oggi le persone chiedono ai propri rappresentanti politici, ai propri leader, la rimozione

    Non la fiducia, lo sforzo caparbio, la lotta per migliorare, ma la rimozione
    La rimozione dei propri problemi, dalle difficoltà, dai fastidi della vita

    È questo il vero problema
    È questo che vuol dire vivere, in modo del tutto errato e totalmente sbiellato, la vita
    Vivere una fantasia dorata e rosa da film
    Essere nel paradigma allucinato del consumismo

    read more

  • Reverse-Engineering the Intel 8087 Stack Circuitry

    Although something that’s taken for granted these days, the ability to perform floating-point operations in hardware was, for the longest time, something reserved for people with big wallets. This began to change around the time that Intel released the 8087 FPU coprocessor in 1980, featuring hardware support for floating-point arithmetic at a blistering 50 KFLOPS. Notably, the 8087 uses a stack-based architecture, a major departure from existing FPUs. Recently [Ken Shirriff] took a literal closer look at this stack circuitry to see what it looks like and how it works.

    Nearly half of the 8087’s die is taken up by the microcode frontend and bus controller, with a block containing constants like π alongside the FP calculation-processing datapath section taking up much of the rest. Nestled along the side are the eight registers and the stack controller. At 80 bits per FP number, the required registers and related were pretty sizeable for the era, especially when you consider that the roughly 60,000 transistors in the 8087 were paired alongside the 29,000 transistors in the 16-bit 8086.

    Each of the 8087’s registers is selected by the decoded instructions via a lot of wiring that can still be fairly easily traced despite the FPU’s die being larger than the CPU it accompanied. As for the unique stack-based register approach, this turned out to be mostly a hindrance, and the reason why the x87 FP instructions in the x86 ISA are still quite maligned today. Yet with careful use, providing a big boost over traditional code, this made it a success by that benchmark, even if MMX, SSE, and others reverted to a stackless design.

    hackaday.com/2025/12/19/revers…

    read more

  • Finger counting. computus compilation, Lorsch 9th century. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1449, fol. 118v.

    read more

  • @anubiarts at the other end:

    Proprietary: let's call the web browser some colonial name like Explorer, Safari

    FLOSS: the menu entry for the web browser must read Web Browser because otherwise the user will be confused about what it does.

    read more

  • @Gina hi Gina, I’m a Canberra based Red Hatter and also on the Linux Australia council (for at least the next month or so).

    Happy to help if I can.

    read more

  • Sophistry as a Service

    read more

  • @ariadne @dysfun ouch, I'm sorry for you (and glad it still works in my installation)

    read more

  • @mcc @dysfun @ariadne I guess it would have been too simple to explain otherwise, ugh

    read more
Post suggeriti
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    1 Views
    Reverse-Engineering the Intel 8087 Stack CircuitryAlthough something that’s taken for granted these days, the ability to perform floating-point operations in hardware was, for the longest time, something reserved for people with big wallets. This began to change around the time that Intel released the 8087 FPU coprocessor in 1980, featuring hardware support for floating-point arithmetic at a blistering 50 KFLOPS. Notably, the 8087 uses a stack-based architecture, a major departure from existing FPUs. Recently [Ken Shirriff] took a literal closer look at this stack circuitry to see what it looks like and how it works.Nearly half of the 8087’s die is taken up by the microcode frontend and bus controller, with a block containing constants like π alongside the FP calculation-processing datapath section taking up much of the rest. Nestled along the side are the eight registers and the stack controller. At 80 bits per FP number, the required registers and related were pretty sizeable for the era, especially when you consider that the roughly 60,000 transistors in the 8087 were paired alongside the 29,000 transistors in the 16-bit 8086.Each of the 8087’s registers is selected by the decoded instructions via a lot of wiring that can still be fairly easily traced despite the FPU’s die being larger than the CPU it accompanied. As for the unique stack-based register approach, this turned out to be mostly a hindrance, and the reason why the x87 FP instructions in the x86 ISA are still quite maligned today. Yet with careful use, providing a big boost over traditional code, this made it a success by that benchmark, even if MMX, SSE, and others reverted to a stackless design.hackaday.com/2025/12/19/revers…
  • Finger counting.

    Uncategorized medieval medievalart
    1
    1
    0 Votes
    1 Posts
    0 Views
    Finger counting. computus compilation, Lorsch 9th century. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1449, fol. 118v.#medieval #MedievalArt
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    0 Views
    "In 2025, the world's economy is in shambles and America has become a totalitarian dystopia."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_(novel)#Plot
  • 0 Votes
    6 Posts
    2 Views
    @Gina hi Gina, I’m a Canberra based Red Hatter and also on the Linux Australia council (for at least the next month or so). Happy to help if I can.