Hardware Basics

[ecapers]

I just want to say thank you for these videos. I've researched dozens of online comp sci videos and tutorials, and none of them come close to the clarity, elegance, and thoroughness of explanation I find in your vids. I've really come to rely on them a lot. 

[TheDuhbin]

Your channel is a gold mine on YouTube. Thank you.

[brokenchains]

this was way ahead of its time. Not the information itself but the quality and dedication and kind of content which was being provided. Great explaination brian will

[coolguy-dwjq]

The quality of this content is way ahead of its time.

[ThePandaGuitar]

THANK YOU SO MUCH! Please please keep making videos Brian they're so rare on YouTube 🙏

[skullbear]

OMG I just found your channel today! I am a graphics programmer and even though I am aware of a lot of these things, I feel I learnt something just because of how well presented and interesting your videos are. And even if it is a known topic, they are an absolute joy to watch! Thank you for these!

[Cires]

this is the first time I've ever found any one explain how a computer works. instead of they all try to explain how programs work

[Ahmad_dev]

There's a mistake in minute 12:56 : "The figure to the right should flip the memory while keeping the index the same. Example: [0A => 'a+3 '], [0D => 'a' ] "... it was correct in the previous slide, but wrong in this slide. Thanks!

[cormano]

I was studying most of this last semester in my college and your small class is way more intuitive, congratulations!

Also, I love how they used Gulliver as a mnemonic jab at the order of bits in memory.

[briantwill]

To be clear, I'm legitimately not an authority on these details, but calling foul when your objections are at best arguable just isn't very helpful. For future corrections, please keep in mind the audience. Spreading misinformation is bad, for sure, and I make plenty of mistakes, but often I elide over details for a reason.

[briantwill]

I appreciate any corrections, but I don't think I was wrong in these cases. I never said Intel created the first 64-bit x86 processors. The byte size issue is very arguable: did the industry adopt the 360 standard because it was popular or because it was a sensible choice that also happened to be popular? Besides, I believe my wording was "mainly because 8 is a power of two and not too large".

You're assuming I don't have the right story because I'm not necessarily giving the full story.

[Abdullah-mgzl]

Thank you for your videos. I have been programming for a while but I had always neglected to actually think about HOW the computer executes my instructions. This was very interesting.

[industrialdonut]

This is very interesting, I always thought the OS or something would manage the cache, now I looked more into it after this and see that it's literally a hardware implementation. Cool!

[Mortuus]

13:11
Little endian is neither "arbitrary" nor does it "not make sense with modern hardware".
First off, the picture suggesting that CPU registers in little endian machines use big endian is wrong. The best example to prove that are bitshift operations in assembly. The second best example are probably SIMD registers.
Secondly, dereferencing the memory location of an unsigned long long as a 32 bit integer truncates the value correctly. That's not easily achievable with big endian machines...

[briantwill]

Yes, IA-64 was the non-x86 compatible and now defunct Itanium,

x86-64 and x64 are actually informal names for 64-bit x86. The official AMD name is AMD64. The official Intel name is EM64T. Everyone else just call it x86-64 or x64.

[naruto]

great..awesome lecture..thanks a lot..
I am totally addicted to your videos(Javascript, OS, C etc)..you are a awesome teacher ..
just one request -Could you please speak a little bit slowly
Waiting for more lectures .

[Mr.Nichan]

I'm not saying you actually weren't saying this, but, to clarify, the intuitiveness of big-endian vs little-endian is about more than just the reading left-to-right vs right-to-left convention. What matters more is the fact that we say and read the big end FIRST and the little end LAST. Interestingly, numerals are written with the big end on the left and the little end on the right in Arabic, just as in English, meaning that that, even though numbers are written in the same physical direction in both languages (when written with Hindu-Arabic numerals), the convention is big-endian in English, and little-endian in Arabic.

Funnily enough, Arabic, Sanskrit, German, and archaic English (as well as modern English for 13-19, noting that "-teen" means "ten"; "-ty" means "groups of ten", FYI) all use the little-endian convention in speech specifically for 2-digit numbers, with the big-endian convention only applying with hundreds, thousands, etc. Generally, whatever convention is used with smaller numbers is the older convention (except sometimes with very small numbers like 0, 1, and 2, and with other special numbers), since, for the most part, bigger numbers used to be very rare (so the conventions for how to say them were ad hoc and easily changed) and bigger and bigger numbers have become more and more commonly mentioned over time, with new standards developing and growing more entrenched.*

Given that we cultural descendants of Europeans often call them "Arabic numberals", the fact that Arabic uses little-endian numerals and the fact that Arabic and disparate Indo-European languages (FYI Arabic is not Indo-European) say the ones' place before the tens' place combine to form a strengthened suggestion that maybe a lot of Eurasia used to use a little-endian convention in saying numbers. However, even if that's true, it's not why Arabic uses a little-endian convention. That's because they're actually HINDU-Arabic numerals, and the Brahmic scripts are all written left-to-right, and, despite the fact that Sanskrit said the ones' place before the tens' place, their numerals were written with a big-endian convention, which meant big end on the left, little end on the right, since they wrote left-to-right. (I've confirmed that some pictures of ancient Indian artifacts on Wikipedia When the Arabs (and Islamized Persians, notably) adopted the Indian system of writing numbers, I guess they must have preserved the physical direction of the writing, which the Europeans also preserved when they adopted it from the Arabs. Thus, an originally big-endian convention became little-endian and then big-endian again.

*One example of this is how so many languages that used to use other bases or mixed bases, like 20, 5, 12, or 60, now use essentially base 10 for large numbers (look up French, Danish, Wolof, and Mesoamerican languages), even if they have remnants of other bases in smaller numbers, and many languages actually borrow a number system from a completely different language to count large numbers, like people using Spanish instead of their native Native American language to count, or languages that only have number up to 2 or 4 or something and have all the larger numbers borrowed from a neighboring language. For example, I believe usually uses Chinese numeral words (called the on'yomi, or Sino-Japanese pronunciation, of the numerals) for any number larger than 10, and usually only uses native Japanese numerals (kun'yomi) for numbers smaller than 10, and not in all situations.

[Decco]

"typical for servers to have 8 or more cores each"

Threadripper: "Am I a joke to you?"

[salatiel]

Tirando o fato de um leve erro (eu acho que é um erro) em 13:13, esse maluco é um monstro! Quanto conhecimento em um só vídeo. Passei horas fazendo anotações! Parabéns e obrigado pelo conteúdo.

[redricochet]

You are so good at this. And your voice is pleasant. I wish you’d keep making these :)