It turns out that programming takes a while. It's even longer when you don't program in C, so you barely have a clue of how to use a compiler. As soon as you add more than 10 megabytes of dependencies, I cry and run away. However, that isn't always the case.

As you know, I'm a vehement supporter of International Backup Awareness Day. You can just listen to my podcast and tell. When the new version of Ubuntu came out last month, I decided to change a bunch of things.

Advanced RISC Machine CPUs, or ARM, have taken over the world in the past 10 years. Although this architecture has been around since the 1980s, it's only with the proliferation of cellphones and their monthly replacement cycles that they have outnumbered everything else. Up until then, they were mostly found in low power applications, like microcontrollers. I find it strange that the same CPU architecture can power some people's most loved and most hated CPUs.

In my recent escapades at work, I have been assigned a project that's outside of the platform we use. The stack looks much like this blog's: Linux, Java, PostgreSQL. The requirements are pretty simple: take two CSV files every day, look over them for duplicate addresses using some web service, then send the files along the usual way. The process will remember addresses for a year.

Remember when Apple was moving away from PowerPC CPUs around 2005? Did you ever wonder where they went? They mostly went into game consoles. The Wii, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360 all have some variant of a PowerPC chip inside. PowerPC chips were never all that popular in personal computers outside of Apple. Presently, most are found in embedded and "big iron" form, like DVRs, cars, mainframes, and other big machines that banks and stuff use to have insane reliability.

Alpha CPUs are pretty obscure these days, and they also seem to be obsolete. This architecture is a load-store or RISC design, and it was one of the first 64-bit ones out there. It was largely optimized by hand, just right when CPU designs were starting to be automated, leading to competitive performance. There was a version of Windows NT released for it, and its floating point performance was superior to x86.

In this second installment of the CPU register series, I take a look at the Itanium CPUs. Intel and HP designed Itanium throughout the 1990s. Intel hoped that it would be the successor to the old x86 architecture, with a bonus of not being legally obliged to share these secrets with anyone else (AMD specifically). When it went on the market in 2001, its performance was not competitive with x86, and was super expensive. While Itanium had x86 emulation, it was not fast enough to be useful. At the time, AMD was busy at work expanding x86 to 64-bit, which proved to be the winning strategy.