Monday, August 25, 2014

Computer Architecture - How To?

Some time ago I remember asking a more senior team member: how does one learn about how hardware operates on the low level? I was answered that this could be learned only from practice.
While I don't think that this is a completely invalid approach - since practical experience is always more valuable than a raw theory - I was searching for some theoretical basis I could get before diving into practice. I think I have something now what I can recommend.
Firstly, there is this course on hardware architecture, which is really good: https://www.coursera.org/course/comparch
Beware though, it is a grad-level course, so the level is really very demanding. You should know what are caches, associativity, memory hierarchy etc. They recommend the following book:
http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Fifth-Quantitative-Approach/dp/012383872X/
I really recommend you start reading it from appendix, which serves a sort of a primer. The book is also very up-to-date, even more than the course itself.
The second book recommended (http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Processor-Design-Fundamentals-Superscalar/dp/1478607831/) provides a lot of low-level details on reservation stations/register renaming, very in-depth on a pair of particular architectures, and a comprehensive description of branch prediction algorithms. Despite it has been just republished, it is a bit outdated (e.g., Intel P6 microarchitecture is used as example), so it is really up to you to buy or to pass.
I hope this has been helpful, and as previously, feel free to comment and discuss.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

SIGGRAPH Talk Accompanying Video


Thanks to our marketing department, I got a permission to post a video we showed during our talk which presents Thief artistic pipeline for reflection creation and setup. It might be somewhat unclear without comments, sorry for that:

Monday, August 18, 2014

SIGGRAPH 2014 Talk 'Reflections in Thief'

Hi guys!
I've decided to start a new dev blog where I'll write about stuff I'm working on as well as book reviews and my random thoughts on graphics in particular and games tech in general.

I don't promise regular updates, but, hopefully, I'll find some time to do them. For the start, I'll upload my SIGGRAPH talk (45.6 MB, .pptx) this year.

Enjoy, and I'll be more than happy to discuss it in the comments.
Peter