Modern Von Neumann machines, how do they work?

Modern Microprocessors - A 90 Minute Guide!. If you didn't find a peculiar joy in computer architecture classes or the canonical tomes on the topic by Patterson and Hennessey, this is the thing for you. It's a great dive into how modern processors work, what the design challenges and trade-offs are, and what you need to know as a software developer.

Totally unrelated: when I interned at Texas Instruments, my last project was writing tests for a pre-silicon DSP. Because there were no test devices, I had to run my code against a simulator. It simulated several million gates of logic and output the result of my program as the wires that come out of the processor registers. This was fun, again in a way peculiar to my interest, at the time, in being a hardware designer/driver hacker. Let me tell you, every debugging tool you will ever see is better than inspecting hex values coming out of registers.

Anyway, these programs ran super slow, each run took about an hour. One day I did the math and figured out the simulator was basically running at 100 hz. Not kilohertz or megahertz. One hundred hertz. So, yeah. In the snow, uphills, both way.

Adam Keys @therealadam