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Embedded Computing: A VLIW Approach to Architecture, Compilers and Tools ReviewThere are two ways to learn more about your country: you can study it directly by travelling around in it, or you can study it indirectly by leaving it. The first method yields facts and insights directly in-context, and the second by contrast.
Our tradition in computer engineering has been to seldom leave our neighborhood. If you want to learn about operating systems, you read an OS book; for multiprocessor systems, you get a book that maps out the MP space.
The book you are holding in your hands can serve admirably in that direct sense. If the technology you are working on is associated with VLIWs or "embedded computing", then clearly it is imperative that you read this book.
But what pleasantly surprised me was how useful this book is, even if one's work is not VLIW-related or has no obvious relationship to embedded computing. I had long felt it was time for Josh Fisher to write his magnum opus on VLIWs, so when I first heard he and his co-authors were working on a book with VLIw in the title, I naturally and enthusiastically assumed this was it. Then I heard the words "embedded computing" were also in the title, and felt considerable uncertainty, having spent most of my professional career in the general-purpose computing arena. I thought embedded computing was interesting, but mostly in the same sense that studying cosmology was interesting: intellectually challenging, but what does it have to do with me?
I should have known better. I don't think Josh Fisher can write boring text. He doesn't know how. (I still consider his "Very Long Instruction Word Architectures and the ELI-512" paper from ISCA-10 to be the finest conference publication I have ever read.) And he seems to have either found like-minded co-authors in Faraboschi and Young, or he taught them well, because Embedded Computing: A VLIW Approach is enthralling in its clarity and exhilarating in its scope. If you are involved in computer system design or programming, you must still read this book, because it will take you to places where the views are spectacular, including those looking over to where you usually live. You don't necessarily have to agree with every point the authors make, but you WILL understand what they are trying to say, and they WILL make you think.
One of the best legacies of the classic Hennessy and Patterson computer architecture textbooks is that the success of their format and style has encouraged more books like theirs. In Embedded Computing: A VLIW Approach, you will find the Pitfalls, Controversies, and occasional Opinion sidebars that made H&P such a joy to read. This kind of technical exposition is like vulcanology done while standing on an active volcano. Look over there, and see molten lava running under a new fissure in the rocks. Feel the heat; it commands your full attention. It's immersive, it's interesting, and it's immediate. If your Vibram soles start melting, it's still worth it. You probably needed new shoes anyway.
I first met Josh when I was a grad student at Carnegie-Mellon in 1982. He spent an hour earnestly describing to me how a sufficiently talented compiler could, in principle, find enough parallelism via a technique he called Trace Scheduling, to keep a really wild looking hardware engine busy. The compiler would speculatively move code all over the place, and then invent more code to fix up what it got wrong. I thought to myself "so THIS is what a lunatic looks like up close. I hope he's not dangerous." Two years later I joined him at Multiflow and learned more in the next five years than I ever have, before or since.
It was an honor to review an early draft of this book, and I was thrilled to be asked to contribute this foreword. As the book makes clear, general-purpose computing has traditionally gotten the glory, while embedded computing quietly keeps our infrastructure running. This is probably just a sign of the immaturity of the general-purpose computing environment (even though we non-embedded types don't like to admit that). With general-purpose computers, people "use the computer" to do something. But with embedded computers, people accomplish some task, blithely and happily unaware that there's a computer involved. Indeed, if they had to be conscious of the computer, their embedded computers would have already failed: antilock brakes and engine controllers, for instance. General-purpose CPUs have a few microarchitecture performance tricks to show their embedded brethren, but the embedded space has much more to teach the general computing folks about the bigger picture: total cost of ownership, who lives in the adjacent neighborhoods, and what they need for all to live harmoniously. This book is a wonderful contribution towards that evolution.
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