What REALLY happens when a computer does "Nothing"
summary
Survey of real NOPs across hardware and software shows concrete results not platitudes: CPUs encode many different no-ops, ARM uses a hint 0 alias and a writable zero register XZR/WZR, ARMv7 uses move r0,r0 NOPs, x86 offers the single byte 0x90 plus sanctioned multi byte NOPs and a max 15-byte x86 instruction, AMD and Linux add longer variants, Unicode exposes 25 Unicode whitespace chars, a Z80 lets you craft a 65,535-byte NOP sequence, researchers found 679 distinct x86 NOP patterns and JITs enabled practical NOP‑sled exploits at Black Hat 2010.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Nothing in computing
- 1:10Computer doing nothing
- 2:36NOP instruction
- 11:25NOP types across architectures
- 23:52Nothingness in culture
- 33:42Load-bearing NOPs impact
- 40:47Hardware handling nothing
- 47:46Nothing in programming languages
- 55:10Semantic nothing in C++
- 1:00:28Magic of nothingness
- 1:01:36Q&A
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