Comment Re:The 19 year old is a lunatic (Score 1) 150
Talent is not the same thing as experience.
I'm in agreement - experience counts for a lot when doing something new.
Being able to do something does not mean it is a good idea to do it.
I'm in agreement with this as well.
So many people have tried this approach to improving efficiency (MIT RAW, Stanford Imagine, Stanford Smart Memories) and have run into such serious problems (compilers, libraries, eco system, system-level support) that unless he has solutions for those problems, starting it again is not a smart idea.
It is highly unlikely that this will go anywhere (so, yeah - agreement again)... BUT... he is displaying a great deal of talent for his age. The lessons he learns from this failure[1] will be more valuable than the lessons learned in succeeding at a less difficult task.
As I understand it, he proposes removing the hardware cache and instead using the compiler to prefetch values from memory. He says the hardware cache logic gates add 40% overhead to every memory fetch. Whether he can actually produce a compiler than will insert the necessary memory fetch instructions at compile time in an efficient manner remains to be seen, but it is still a worthwhile endeavour for a 19 year old.
[1] Worst case scenario. He might succeed after all.