Living life the processor way!

1)      Pipelining:

Our computing experience would have been damn demure and as slow as Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s scripts had the concept of pipelining not been floated. Pipelining is simple words means doing two or more tasks in such a way that while the first one is being process you fetch the second one and being processing it. This efficiently keeps your “Fast” processor busy enough and saves your time. I believe the concept is no “Eureka” material for the floater of this concept has just copied the lifestyle of some of the busiest guys around. With life keeping me on my toes with DDU Connect, websites, large circle of friends, family and (word not to be typed here), it’s pipelining that helps me save some bucks which otherwise I would have used to hire a secretary to “manage” my time.

                Nothing goes ON forever (The sentence has deeper implications, but not meant to be elaborated here). Everything halts (not stops) at some instance time. Hence by the time something is taking its time to be processed, why not switch over to other tasks. Talking about my personal life breathing in a college with bromidic atmosphere, 3 sessionals and DDU Connect do take up some hours out of those odd 24. We work month round for DDU Connect as we need to let out an issue every month. An exam every month is certainly not what every person fasting asks god for in his wish. As soon as the monthly torture gets over, it’s time to rub your butts hard enough in order to send DDU Connect’s N^th issue to printing press. Where’s life? Life is where you give it place. We (I’m referring to Editors and Designers in DDU Connect) find our little or more life while the newspaper is being printed at the press. Our family, our girlfriends/boyfriends and our hobbies receive our courtesy while the copies are being minted at the press. After that is again time for DDU and DDU Connect.

                My motive to narrate this is that “I” believe we’re (People in DDU Connect) efficient processors with good pipelining mechanism for neither does DDU Connect suffer and nor do people around us quibble too much for our attention. Hence, while there is one thing being executed take up the other, life is easier. Multi-tasking is never possible, but who says you can‘t illusion it?

2)      Overclocking

Intel Core i5 3.30GHz. Essential to clock the processor at 3.30 GHz? Nah!! To unleash your processor’s real processing mettle, unlock it and clock it at a higher rate to give it a ride in heaven. Overclocking is the process of making a computer or component operate faster than the clock frequency specified by the manufacturer by modifying system parameters. (Most commonly the clock frequency is modified; alternatively changing the operating voltage too is termed as overclocking). The purpose of overclocking is to increase the operating speed of given hardware. Many people overclock or ‘rightclock’ their hardware to improve its performance. This is practiced more by enthusiasts than professional users seeking an increase in the performance of their computers.

If techies can overclock their processors to improve its performance, why can’t we overclock ourselves to mitigate our own performance? By using the term “overclocking” in conjunction with humans I intend to convey the cliché message of “walking the extra mile”. It’s imperative to walk that extra mile if you want to excel at “ALL” fronts in life.

Talking about personal life, the concept of pipelining does pose up a number of challenges for you. You take you multiple instructions simultaneously, but how do you cope up? There are times you’ve got to skip meals; you don’t get sleep for days together, no movies for month, no outing and a lot of no’s. But all this pertains to us, our own mindset, doesn’t it? It’s all about tricking your mind to “overclock yourself”. Make your mind believe you’re not hungry, tell it repeatedly that you don’t need sleep, tell it that movies and entertainment are just a waste of time and overclocking yourself, crossing your own boundaries will be much more easier.

Technically overclocking does have tradeoffs like heating up the processor. But the gain is mightier than the tradeoff. Similarly, overclocking yourself has a higher gain of professional and personal accomplishments (better academics, extra-curriculars etc. OR personal stuff like giving an hour to parents or better half @ night, they will be really happy) compared of tradeoff like giving away your sleep for nights together.

It’s up to you. You can overclock yourself to make the most of your mettle or be an under-achiever on somebody’s TIME magazine.

When things don’t fit in given limits, just change the limits

3)      Out of order execution

Have taken up engineering, studying, slogging, mugging, awaiting the degree, degree not in hands till 4 years. Degree not in hands, hence nobody allows me in job-interviews. Ah, I can’t work! Girlfriend ka kharcha nahi nikalta… Parents se zyada maang nahi sakte… Caught in the order of – FIRST STUDIES and THEN WORK? Then what you need to do is “Go out of the order”.

Out-of-the-order execution is a paradigm in the processing world which states that if the CPU doesn’t have operands for a particular operation available it can go out of the order of a typical instruction cycle (like Inst Fetch, Decode, Fetch Op, Execute Inst and Store Result) and go to another instruction to execute it.

Somehow I find crowd in my college too tamed. People love sticking to pre-established principles one of them being “Studies first”. I’ve so many people around with exceptional talents and skills, but it’s the order, the sequence which has prisoned them and has not allowed them to come out of their cocoons.

For today’s youth, it requires that some pre-established notions need to be broken. If you want to achieve something you’ll have to go out of the order. Do something ‘out-of-the-order’. Learn something before it’s taught in college (doesn’t imply mugging a text-book chapter a day before it’s taught by the prof), earn before you’re placed in 7^th semester or teach before you become a professor… These are some things that help you stand out from the crowd. If you don’t want to be jealous seeing somebody in the limelight, then the best way is you yourself become the limelight. To do this, I don’t mean to adopt unfair or manipulative means. I am just asking you to do something unconventional as per your standards. Always remember, extend your own line rather than erasing others’ line.

Nobody till date has ever got name, fame or success by doing conventional things. They’ve defied pre-existing notions, they’ve gone ‘out-of-order’ and achieved.

So, if we can program a processor to go out-of-order then I believe we definitely can adopt the same.

4)      Caching

The last in my list – caching, is I believe the simplest and most fundamental of all. In computing jargon, caching refers to predicting which data is needed often and keeping it ready before hand in a way that it can be accessed faster than usual.

Even humans can cache certain things. For things I coin a “Predict & Prepare” principle. F*** the astrologers, we laymen are better predictors of events in OUR OWN life. Trust yourself and your instinct to know what is in store for you in the immediate future. The best case in this situation is making your future yourself. Computer has a limitation because it has a user and it has to predict the behavior of that user for caching data. But you, you are your own user. Either predict things for yourself or make things for yourself. Once done, prepare yourself well in advance so that when the data request comes, you don’t “miss” it but “hit” it.

Above four mentioned techniques are a few paradigms that boost up a processor’s performance. Applied to our life, they can boost ours. This was no sophistry, it was sheer logic worth application in real-time. I am no oracle to preach such things. I thought sharing it would coin a new perspective and your response will judge if it was worth the effort.

Love & Regards,

Anish.