alt Hacker NewsI once had a mentor that was trying to help me write a CPU characterization and being a phd in math every suggestion he proposed involved derivatives. I was like, why would I describe I486 cache misses in terms of differential equations? To this day I still don’t know what he meant.
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_alternator_ • today at 7:23 PM
TBH, this might be a good time to figure out what he was talking about! A good continuous approximation of a discrete problem can radically simplify the situation. And current LLMs are extremely patient tutors.
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epogrebnyak • today at 8:49 PM
Maybe he trying looking at cache like some flow problem... Perhaps useful for the cache size, not the misses, it seems
I remember a story about Feynman doing the same thing (analyzing a computer program with differential equations). Seems to have worked well for him.
See https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4752749/how-could-f...