Julio Merino:

All of this growth has been in service of ever-growing programs. But… even if programs are now more sophisticated than they were before, do they all really require access to a 64-bit address space? Has the growth from 8 to 64 bits been a net positive in performance terms?

Let’s try to answer those questions to find some very surprising answers.

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We observe massive differences in the machine code generated for the trivial main function. The 64-bit code is definitely smaller than the 32-bit code, contrary to my expectations. But the code is also very different; so different, in fact, that ILP32 vs. LP64 doesn’t explain it.

Was the move to 64-bit CPUs all upside? Julio runs the numbers to show some pros and cons.

Eugen Rochko writing on the Mastodon blog:

Mastodon 4.3 just landed! If you’re a mastodon.social user, you might have already seen some of this in action as we’ve been gradually rolling out these updates over the course of the last 11 months in nightly releases, but we’re finally making a new stable release available to the community. If you use a different server, you will get access to these improvements once your server operator upgrades.

This one’s been in the works for a long time. The notification improvements are most welcome. I have been using the Phanpy Mastodon client for a while, partly due to grouped notifications. Glad this has functionality has made it to the official client now.

sdomi:

In 1999, some members from the MMC Association decided to split and create SD Association. But nobody seems to exactly know why.

I’m sure there’s some folks out there that were part of these associations. Hopefully they will get in touch with sdomi and enlighten us all.

Nathan Dyer:

A couple weeks ago I decided to purchase a MacBook Air M2, with the specific purpose of running Asahi Fedora Remix. I chose this particular model because it’s the newest chipset that is supported by Asahi, and Best Buy was having a $200 off sale on them, presumably before Apple announces a new slate of laptops and stops offering the aging M2-based systems.

There were several things I really loved about the system (battery life was astounding, the trackpad was marvellous, and the display was beautiful), but ultimately I made the decision to return it; the experience just wasn’t what I needed for a daily driver.

Seems like there’s still a bit of polishing required for Asahi to match the experience of Linux on non-Apple hardware.

Arnaud Carré:

The Commodore Amiga 500 had a blitter chip. Its main function was to move bitmap graphics from one location to another while applying logical operations. The Amiga’s blitter could handle up to three bitmap sources at once and perform logical operations between them. To specify which operation to use, you needed to set an 8-bit value in the chip, known as the “minterm.”

Three bitmap sources and an 8-bit value to control logical combinations! Doesn’t that sound like a primitive version of the modern AVX vpternlogd instruction?

An unexpected correlation between a particular AVX-512 instruction and 35 year old Amiga graphics hardware.