The thing about government intervention in our lives is that it's so common it shouldn't, these days, be a surprise anymore. But these people are good.
First, I need to recall the meddling I had to put up with when I had an attic extension done in my house back in Glasgow. The attic had already been made into a two-daughter bedroom, but it had merely been floored, beams removed, and Velux-style windows installed. Since the girls were getting older, we wanted to increase the headroom by installing full Dormers, and adding some walls to divide the space into two rooms and a Jack-and-Jill. Well, cut a long story short, the existing staircase into the attic was not compliant with the regulations. The bottom stairs executed a direct 90 degree turn, instead of going via a 45 degree one. Now none of us had ever had any problems with the existing stairs. Nor had the three families prior to us. But rules are rules, so we had to spend another 500 pounds to get the thing changed. But the most annoying part of it was the reason the building inspector gave in order to justify the change. He was probably trying to make me feel better but it just made me more annoyed. He told me, "It's a nicer finish. It will be more marketable this way".
The Man was trying to tell me the change he was enforcing was good for business. Grr.
Well the latest from the "Department of Sticking Their Noses In" is a Scottish Government "initiative" to revitalize the now-kinda-filled-in Silicon Valley. Some smart force-backed person has decided to add another rule to improve Scottish architecture. This time however, it's computer architecture. It goes like this.
Anyone who has paid any attention to the hardware specs when buying a new PC will have heard of a particular kind of memory called "cache". To simplify way more than is good for me: cache is different from "regular" memory in three ways. First, it tends to be faster; second, there's less of it; and third, it is organized -- or "architected"-- in a peculiar way. But if you get those things right -- speed, size, architecture -- you can dramatically increase the performance of the PC. And in an attempt to "help" Scottish designers get it right, some government boffins have decided to impose some "building control" on the architecture of caches in systems designed in Scotland.
To give an "artist's impression" of cache memory, imagine a large number of special lego bricks (or "legos" if you're in the US); special in that they can be connected on four faces instead of just two. And imagine that you have to arrange them in a rectangle. There are three basic configurations: a tall one-brick-wide column, a wide one-brick-tall row; or something in between.
Now it turns out that *in theory* the "best" architecture for a cache is the tall one-brick-wide arrangement. One of the key measures of how good a cache is is termed its "hit rate", and the tall column approach has the maximum hit rate. But as I say, the arrangement is only best *in theory*. In practice, other factors are also at play, and the best architecture really depends on a lot of things. It's something that the designers of each system are best, in a sane world, left to figure out for themselves.
But Mr Sanity does not seem to be at home in Scotland. Rather, Nanny Government knows best. Effective today, in order to "Allow Scotland to punch above its weight in computer design", all caches designed in Scotland must, by force of law, be fully associative.
Altogether now, "Oh dig me a grave. And dig it sae deeeeeep....".