Register renaming is the action of replacing the registers used by an instruction with different registers.

When register renaming is used, there are more physical registers (actual hardware registers) than there are logical registers. A logical register is a register which is defined to exist by …

Today I finished learning about two of the common (or were common in 1995 at any rate) methods for renaming registers.

First off I should probably explain what "renaming registers" means. In order to have multiple instructions executing in parallel and/or executing out of order (very common nowad…

I will be trying out a new idea while developing the SHMUP: Develop it as though I am creating it for a console, where the console is my specific computer. The plan is to add in support for other hardware afterwards. This should also help me determine the system requirements, as I will be a …

Well, I am finally through the prereqs section of the graph theory book. Although I didn't do the final problem set, I should have a good enough grasp on the subjects to make use of them.

I am currently considering using kinematics for animation in the SHMUP rather than dynamics, which would all…

A function is similar to a relation. It is a set of ordered pairs (a, b) where a is an element of some set A and b is an element of some set B. For each element in A, there is exactly one ordered pair with that element in the first position. Given such a function f, we say that it is a functi…

Today I learned about equivalence relations, equivalence classes, partitions, divides, and congruent to modulo n.

An equivalence relation is a relation that is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Pretty straight forward.

An equivalence class (also known as an equivalence set) is denoted [a] = {x |…

Apparently you can get a lot of the GDC presentations for free at the GDC Vault website. It doesn't have everything unfortunately (I couldn't find Erin Catto's 2006 presentation), but there are some cool things in there. I didn't have much time to browse around, but the Halo: Reach networking…

I spent most of the morning creating a forum post asking for people's opinions of Chris Hecker's physics references list. I posted it on four forums: The Bullet Physics Simulation Forum, GameDev.net, TIGSource, and Physics Forums. It's been interesting to see how active the various forums are.…

Today I started reading Introductory Graph Theory by Gary Chartrand. It's starting off teaching about modeling. Modeling in this case is turning something into math, such as the area of a square being A=W^2.

I reached the part in the book where it talks about actual graphs, but it was using ter…

Today I decided to learn about the Laplace Transform and eigenvectors/values.

From what I gather, the Laplace Transform transforms a function f(t) into a function f(s). I'm not entirely sure what "s" is supposed to be though... I suspect it is used as a temporary placeholder for going inbetween…