Felix Held
Felix has studied electrical engineering and currently works as a freelancer in the area of hardware, FPGA, firmware and software engineering. He is interested in finding out how software and hardware works and how they can be improved.
Why memory is a hard problem in modern computer architectures
Back at the beginning of home computers, volatile memory was a rather easy problem to solve in the computer architecture, but with the computers getting faster and multiple cores, it has become a surprisingly tricky problem for processor and chipset designers to solve.
This talk tries to shed some light on the difficulties of implementing high-performance memory subsystems and how solutions to those difficulties affect the design of RAM, memory controllers, cache subsystems and even the microarchitecture of the processor cores.