In this age of containers and virtualization, are we losing touch with hardware and the raw performance available to us?

Kenneth chats to Kevin & Len about our current understanding of hardware performance and if it matters in this age of containers and virtualization.

Spawned by an article on Non-uniform Memory Access in modern multi-CPU architectures, Kenneth realizes that it has been years since he racked up a server or cared about the bare metal at all. How disconnected has he become in the quest for only dealing with servers through API's?

Some resources mentioned during the show:

  • NUMA Deep Dive Part 1: From UMA to NUMA - http://frankdenneman.nl/2016/07/07/numa-deep-dive-part-1-uma-numa/
  • Approximate cost to access various caches and main memory - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4087280/approximate-cost-to-access-various-caches-and-main-memory
  • Why is it faster to process a sorted array than an unsorted array? - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-it-faster-to-process-a-sorted-array-than-an-unsorted-array
  • The Making of: ROM City Rampage (Retro City Rampage 8bit) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvx4xXhZMrU
  • Scene.org Awards - http://awards.scene.org/
  • How PayPal Scaled to Billions of Transactions Daily Using Just 8 VMs - http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/8/15/how-paypal-scaled-to-billions-of-transactions-daily-using-ju.html
  • The WhatsApp Architecture Facebook Bought for $19 Billion - http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture-facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html
  • Reactions to the beer cache hierachy - http://blog.netopyr.com/2014/11/28/reactions-to-the-beer-cache-hierarchy/
  • Transatlantic ping faster than sending a pixel to the screen? - http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen
  • AMD unveils Radeon Pro SSG graphics card with up to 1TB of flash memory - http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/07/amd-radeon-pro-ssg-graphics-card-specs-price-release-date/
  • Visual 6502 in JavaScript - http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/

And finally our picks

Kevin: * Humanscale Float desk - http://www.humanscale.com/products/product.cfm?group=float

Len: * Immutant - http://immutant.org

Thanks for listening!

Stay in touch:

  • Website & newsletter - https://zadevchat.io
  • Socialize - https://twitter.com/zadevchat & http://facebook.com/ZADevChat/
  • Suggestions and feedback - https://github.com/zadevchat/ping
  • Subscribe and rate in iTunes - http://bit.ly/zadevchat-itunes