Dr. Agrawal's Class - With No Work to Do

I am in Dr. Agrawal's class and half of my classmates are gone for MJSS. Dr. Agrawal started the class by telling us that there was no work to do. Was he joking around with us? No work to do in math - I could hardly believe it - there are always plenty of problems to practice on . . . But Dr. Agrawal was serious and asked us what we would like to do. Somebody jokingly suggested that we go outside and, since it was a sunny day, Dr. Agrawal thought that was a good idea.

While he was walking over to the phone to ask Mr. Bals if that was allowed, Michael noticed a cart of Macs. So, just as Dr. Agrawal was about to make the call, Michael asked if we could use them. Dr. Agrawal switched focus with us - forgetting entirely about going outside and agreeing to let us use the computers. So, today in math class, not only did we not do math and almost get to go outside, but we were able to do whatever we wanted (within the parameters of the school rules) on the computers! This is probably one of Dr. Agrawal's most unusual classes so far. Even more unusual, I am writing this blog post for English class in math class right now!

Bonus Tech Stuff: OpenRISC

OpenRISC is an open source CPU architecture. OpenRISC can be 32 or 64-bit, and may have 16 or 32 general purpose registers. An OpenRISC-based cubesat called TechEdSat was launched into space in 2012.  Samsung incorporates OpenRISC processors in their DTV SoCs. OpenRISC also has a wide variety of available SIMD instructions.

There are two main implementations of OpenRISC - OpenRISC 1200 and mor1kx. Mork1x is highly customizable, but is only single issue. OpenRISC 1200 is a bit faster, and can reach 1.34 CoreMarks/MHz. However, this is much lower than a typical ARM or Intel core. OpenRISC, at least with current implementations, cannot be considered to be a legitimate alternative to modern application processor architectures. However, it can be a nice example to check out if you want to learn about processor pipelines.

#slice2016