How Bit Shifting & Bit Masking Work June 1, 2019 by thepigeonfighter Last post we talked about binary on a basic level. If you are not comfortable with reading binary or counting in binary I recommend you check out that post before reading this one. Using bit shifting and bit masking judiciously opens the door for massive performance optimizations in low level hardware and high level systems alike. Read on to find out how. ...
What is Binary? April 17, 2019 by thepigeonfighter Learning how to understand Binary will change how you see all numbers. What is Binary? I am sure you have had that question at least once or twice before. Usually for me what happened in the past was, I would ask that question and then end up in some article written for a college Computer Science course that would over-explain what is a pretty simple idea. Adding in poor un-intuitive examples to further muddy up the waters. So I want to remove the mystery about it once and for all. Taking your skills from zero to one when it comes to binary. ...
How does your Processor Process? March 30, 2019 by thepigeonfighter An exploration into how your Processor works. In previous posts I have described how computers store information and how the special ALU chip can run elementary operations on that information. In this post I will endeavor to bring it all together into a cohesive overview of how your processor works. Before I dive into the details, I want to step back and talk about the overall architecture. ...