Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source.
The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
> if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
The last few sentences to me read like he knows for sure that the organisation is actively working against what he sees as his important goals. Carefully worded (and likely personal lawyer approved) to avoid burning the bridges as he mic-drops and deftly avoids having the door hit him in the arse as he struts out.
I felt like he avoided saying anything negative about Intel just in case it would be taken that way. Intel doesn’t have the best reputation so we are all interpolating a much more negative message than he actually said.
Agreed. He also mentioned these years being “some of the toughest at intel”. To me it read as 1) Amazing that he managed to get anything done at all with this kind of turmoil and 2) A not so subtle hint that things aren’t all good at Intel.
> The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers.
It’s a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of valued employees wouldn’t be allowed to represent a big company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person sitting next to them.
Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably. His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people who've read or written 800 pages on system performance
> Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.
This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.
If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.
With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.
In terms of their compensation though, it functionally doesn't really matter, and that's somewhat true for being a professional as well, it's usually only important how many people think you're good enough. A job is often as or more political as it is technical
Flamegraph is literally just a perl script that visualizes the stack traces collected by perf/dtrace (kernel). It's a good tool though but it doesn't need to be oversold for its capabilities, the hard work is done by the kernel. And honestly, many times it is not that useful at all and can be quite misleading, and not because of the bug in the tool but because how CPUs are inherently designed to work.
What concept in particular? There is nothing novel about that tool, it visualizes the stats collected by perf, and as I said it's not even that useful in root cause analysis in performance regressions, which is like the main point it is marketed for.
I could be wrong about this but, if I had a guess, I'd say the 24GB M5 chips/systems exist due to binning.
Apple is designing and manufacturing a chip/chipset/system with 32GB with integrated memory. During QA, parts that have one non-conformant 8GB internal module out of the four are reused in a cheaper (but still functional) 24GB product line rather than thrown away.
Market segmentation also has its hand in how the final products are priced and sold, but my strong guess is that, if Apple could produce 32GB systems with perfect yield, they would, and the 24GB system would not exist.
The memory is not on-die, it’s separate (completely standard) memory chips, either DDR4 or DDR5 depending on which M-series CPU you’re looking at. So binning doesn’t really apply.
Seems like there's a misunderstanding on my part here. <reads more>
Ah, the memory is integrated in the same package (the "chip" that gets soldered onto the motherboard) as the integrated CPU/GPU, and I had understood that correctly. However, I had incorrectly surmised that it was built into the same silicon die.
Thanks for the correction!
Lesson: TIL about the difference between System-In-a-Package (SIP) and System-On-a-Chip, and how I had misunderstood the Apple Silicon M series processors to be SoCs when they're SiPs.
No worries! It’s made more difficult to understand by 1) Apple’s marketing, which does a great job of tricking people into thinking that the memory is actually integrated into the die without actually saying so, and 2) the fast-and-loose use of the SoC and SiP terms, which are often used interchangeably, including by Apple in official marketing materials [1].
A friend of mine had an art studio at the Nicholas Building, and I got to speak with a jeweller who told me that he still did a lot of bespoke work in wedding rings, especially for tradies who would otherwise wear down store-bought rings because they were solid gold and therefore softer. I don't remember the details, but he specialised in harder alloys that are nevertheless mostly gold, and therefore "good as gold" for a wedding ring.
The downturn was brutal, but the drop in development was also needed.
At the height of the property bubble around 2005-2007, Spain (pop ~44M) was building more units per year than Germany, France and the UK (combined pop. ~195M).[1]
During the GFC Spain suffered from population shrinkage [2], surfeit of available housing stock, and the economic crunch pushed into the market some of the housing stock that would previously have been kept in reserve, so yeah, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing that building activities slowed down.
[1] I don't have a source, because I learnt this from a bunch of attendees to a conference on concrete (yes, the kind you use for building) in Madrid in 2007. We exchanged impressions on how software conferences (PyCon forever!) are different from the ones in the building industry, and they shared some eye opening statistics.
The failure mode of educational systems and institutions is to perform selection of students more likely to require less help in learning, rather than bear the burden of having to perform actual instruction.
Survivor bias takes care of promoting the educational system or institution with successful alumni, whether the alumni were taught while they were students, or merely selected during the application process.
The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
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