June, 2010 | Jakob Engblom

When is Scripting really Programming?

I recently updated some analysis scripts in Simics to use the new OS awareness framework in Simics 4.4. While doing so, I completely updated the structure of the code, ending up with something looking suspiciously like a regular Python program. It had declarations, classes, variables, did not rely on global variables, and was fairly robust to changes in the target.…

Travelling into 64-bit Land with Simics

The new Freescale QorIQ P5020 SoC that was announced this week at the Freescale Technology Forum means that yet another chip family has now moved to 64 bits from 32 bits. This is a familiar scenario that has been played out many times before, starting in the mid-1990s as Sun, IBM and MIPS upgraded their server processor architectures to 64…

True Concurrency is Truly Different (Again)

A recent article at Ars Technica describes yet another security flaw in Windows. Nothing much new in that respect, but this is indeed an interesting attack in that it is enabled by using multicore hardware. It is not practical on a single processor, demonstrating once again how multicore is fundamentally different from multitasking on a single processor. 57