AMD was a lot of fun. I still remember playing board games during lunch with my work buddy James Creamer (If you see this and I misspelled your name let me know). I also remember staying at work late, both because we had bring-up for a new chip during my internship, and because I overlapped my last week of Finals with my first week of work.
My manager Shekhar Singh joked during my first week as an Automated Test Equipment (ATE) Engineer, that it was good we had the Advantest handlers. Otherwise I would be testing the chips by hand. Funnily enough the Chiller for the handler broke, and to meet a deadline me and James spent a whole day loading the chips into a test machine by hand. I still remember him resting his eyes to the white noise.
It was also during my time at AMD I started my 8 bit CPU project.
Microarchitecture is Yale Patt's signature class and widely considered the hardest course offered by the department. But is it the best place to learn CPU design, when the assignment makes you balance design complexity and tooling development against a... Read More
Sometimes I look at my sisters cat and wonder what he can understand. My sister's cat is named Boba. He is a good sort of fellow, well behaved, polite... endlessly hungry. Often, I look at him and wonder what he sees. Of course his vision is different ... Read More
Fundamentally, engineering is just about choosing whats best. The hard part is just figuring out what is best. Getting caught up in my regrets used to feel like progress. After all, introspection is the first step to improvement. While important, intro... Read More
How I learned to let go of small things like ‘value proposition’, ‘opportunity cost’ and ‘reason’ in order to embrace the transistor. In the later half of my internship at AMD in 2019, I was struck by the Muse. I had just seen the Monster 6502, which i... Read More
Being clear about what you mean is a skill, but being clear while avoiding accountability for the consequences is a profession Everybody knows that lying is wrong. Or at the very least, that lying too much will get you in trouble. Everybody also knows ... Read More
This is a simple tool that I made to strip HTML out of transcripts I was copying and pasting. I also occasionally run into situations where there are many superscripts and it gets tedious to remove them all by hand. Just note that the tool is a little ... Read More
A colleague sent me a link. Hours later, I was still deep in a rabbit hole of assembly, auto-vectorization, and benchmarking GCC vs. Clang. One of my long time colleagues Brendan sent me a link that you can view HERE. Naturally, I opened it as soon as ... Read More
