The Curious Engineer

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What are you optimizing for?

fprox.substack.com

Computer Architecture, Computer Arithmetic, RISC-V. Click to read "What are you optimizing for?", by FPRox, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

CPU / microarchitectureMathSecurityAssemblyPerformance / optimization

’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
68 from 3 Aug 2016 to 11 Oct 2026
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monthly (9 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 8

  1. RISC-V Bulk Normalization Algorithm (RVBNA)
  2. Is Some Lattice-Based Post-Quantum Cryptography Broken? (update: No!)
  3. RISC-V's Zvzip is Changing
  4. Manifest for RISC-V Constant Time Floating-Point Operations
  5. RISC-V and Floating-Point
  6. Emulating future RISC-V Vector extensions
  7. RISC-V Vector Is Expanding
  8. RISC-V and Post Quantum Cryptography

2025 8

  1. IEEE-754: THE floating-point standard
  2. Micro-Benchmarking a RISC-V SBC (CanMV K230)
  3. Results of Quick RISC-V Survey
  4. Quick Survey on RISC-V Development
  5. OCP MX Scaling Formats
  6. RISC-V Vector Reduction Operations
  7. Taxonomy of RISC-V Vector Extensions
  8. Faster NTT with RISC-V Vector

2024 8

  1. Quick Note: swapping pairs with RVV
  2. Number Theoretic Transform with RVV
  3. Accelerating CRC with RISC-V Vector
  4. Unpacking the CanMV K230 RISC-V board
  5. RISC-V Scalar Bit Manipulation Extensions
  6. Partial Taxonomy of 8-bit Floating-Point Formats
  7. Implementing Softmax using RISC-V Vector
  8. Transposing a Matrix using RISC-V Vector

2023 19

  1. RVV implementation of Keccak / SHA-3 (part 1)
  2. RISC-V Vector Programming in C with Intrinsics
  3. Zimop/Zcmop may-be-operations
  4. RISC-V support for BFloat16
  5. RISC-V Smcntrpmf: mode filtering for Zicntr
  6. RVB profile: application class profile with options
  7. RISC-V vector crypto spec freeze update
  8. Zfa: even more floating-point operations
  9. Adding a new RISC-V instruction (to LLVM)
  10. Zicond: RISC-V integer conditional operations
  11. Adding a new RISC-V instruction (to spike)
  12. RISC-V Profiles
  13. Sneak peek at RISC-V RVA23(U64) profile
  14. RISC-V Vector Cryptography Extension (2/2)
  15. RISC-V Vector Cryptography Extensions (1/2)
  16. RISC-V Vector in a Nutshell
  17. RISC-V Vector extension in a nutshell (part 1)
  18. RISC-V Vector Element Groups
  19. RISC-V Compressed Instructions (part 2): Zc extensions

2022 12

  1. RISC-V Compressed Instructions (part 1): C extension
  2. RISC-V Vector Register Groups
  3. How to read a RISC-V Vector assembly instruction
  4. Support of half precision floating-point format in RISC-V ISA: Zfh(min), Zvfh(min)
  5. RISC-V Register Files
  6. RISC-V Vector extension in a nutshell (Part 5.2): vector loads and store
  7. RISC-V Vector extension in a nutshell (Part 5.1): vector loads and store
  8. RISC-V Vector Extension in a Nutshell (Part 4): permute operations
  9. RISC-V Vector Extension in a Nutshell (Part 3): mask & masked operations
  10. RISC-V Vector Extension in a Nutshell (Part 2): arithmetic operations
  11. New option for RISC-V Vector performance simulation
  12. Performance simulation of RISC-V vector extension using GEM5

2021 3

  1. Programming with RISC-V Vector extension: how to build and execute a basic RVV test program (emulation/simulation)
  2. Assisted assembly development for RISC-V RV32
  3. A brief history of open source libms (mathematical libraries)

2020 1

  1. Introduction to polynomial approximation (WiP)

2019 4

  1. Testing metalibm from the demo Docker image
  2. Computing floating-point division from an accurate reciprocal [WiP]
  3. Accelerating Erasure Coding with Bit Matrix Multiply
  4. Computing floating-point approximation of log(1+x)

2018 3

  1. Docker Power
  2. Determining numerical bound for floating-point reciprocal overflow
  3. On the quality of random

2017 1

  1. New instruction for Fast GCM multiplication

2016 1

  1. Short note: consequence of arithmetic overflow