I have not posted for a few years but this one really has annoyed me enough to say something regarding these Brexit ads.

For a start there are no new elections or referendums so it's hardly trying to influence a vote, the Guardian (left wing) newspaper would love to have a second referendum and reverse the vote and is most likely why they have flagged this up.

I can see how not knowing who is paying for these ads may be a problem for some, but like I said there is no public vote coming up and therefore as far as a I know campaign financing rules do apply, besides I did not see the Guardian kick up a fuss when Soros donated £400,000 to reverse Brexit.

Finally a large chunk of Conservative (the governing party) MPs themselves have said the same thing that this advert is saying so how is this fake news?

If there was any semblance that there was democracy in the UK, it has pretty much has been laid to rest.

System calls where always slow because they used to be called via a software interrupt call.

SYSCALL is an in x64 instruction that speeds this up, introduced by AMD.

Speculative execution predates SYSCALL by about 5 years.

System calls are now slower because the kernel memory now has to be mapped and unmapped when the system call enters/leaves rather than be mapped all the time. This has to be done because memory that was marked as privledged can now be accessed by user programs i.e. memory protection no longer works and the only fix for the problem is to unmap the memory.

Speculative execution does n't mean we have have this problem, AMD managed to do it fine. No one can say this is by design, if it is by design then it should be documented since 1995 that the MMU protection can be bypassed.

For power users "Fast enough" is not the reason people are not upgrading, I used to do a 3 year replacement cycle and each time get a machine at least twice as fast as my previous one. My current machine is well over five years old and other than for tasks that can take advantage of a large number of cores any upgrade will get me around a 50% performance increase, which makes its just not worth it.

I think that is unfair because Visual Studio can be used for a lot of different things. Why would anyone using VS to develop Windows Apps for example need to have knowledge of Expression Studio?

If a potential customer does n't even know that the product exists, especially one who uses their other development tools thats a big massive fail in my book.

I'd like to see what happens when the sellers stop fulfilling orders. Plus how long before someone brings out a sniping tool for customers to purchase items when at the bottom of the curve?

Those hardly used instructions probably use less than 0.1% of the CPU die, that is because they are microcoded instructions and run hideously slow.

This is n't the case, the only x86 processor that converted x86 instructions to RISC instructions was the AMD K5. Infact even in a RISC architecures the instruction decode stage expands out the instruction and this is what happens on a modern x86 processor.

The complexity in a modern processor is not in the instruction decode, but the multiple execution units.

I doubt it would add that much considering you already have to implement Tomasulo to go superscaler, it could be added onto that relatively easily. Of course it will add more circuitry and I agree Intel will have problems making something as low power as the current crop of ARM chips however when we get to something that is say the midpoint between an A9 and i3, Intel will be able to compete easily and also have its process advantage. It could easily be a case of ARM winning the battle and losing the war.

And how much money do you think ARM makes on that $10 part?

And there are far more 8-bit and 16-bit CPUs that use CISC instruction sets than ARM chips. The quantities mean nothing, it is who is making the most money and Intel certainly won that one.

Any superscaler processor is going to be doing instruction conversion, this includes RISC instruction set processors. The micro-ops in Intel processors convert to are less than RISC instructions. Once you start implementing things like Tomasulo the traditional advantages of RISC are eroded. If this was n't the case Intel would have never been able to leverage their process advantage to get better performance whilst retaining the x86 instruction set.

In a high performance processor instruction set is irrelavant since 80%+ of the die area is cache any way.

After finding out there are people buying spell casting services overy ebay in their thousands this is not surprising at all. A fool and his/her money is quickly seperated.

This is called business, using whatever advantage you have to compete against a competitor. Last time I checked Intel was a business.

Wow sounds very secure, hopefully they did n't decide to go with ROT-13 twice.