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To Reinvent the Processor

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday May 14 2019, @07:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the gate-twiddling dept.

RamiK writes:

I'm tired of the dominance of the out-of-order processor. They are large and wasteful, the ever-popular x86 is especially poor, and they are hard to understand. Their voodoo would be more appreciated if they pushed better at the limits of computation, but it's obvious that the problems people solve have a latent inaccessible parallelism far in excess of what an out-of-order core can extract. The future of computing should surely not rest on terawatts of power burnt to pretend a processor is simpler than it is.

There is some hope in the ideas of upstarts, like Mill Computing and Tachyum, as well as research ideas like CG-OoO. I don't know if they will ever find success. I wouldn't bet on it. Heck, the Mill might never even get far enough to have the opportunity to fail. Yet I find them exciting, and much of the offhand "sounds like Itanium" naysay is uninteresting.

This article focuses on architectures in proportion to how much creative, interesting work they've shown in public. This means much of this article comments on the Mill architecture, there is a healthy amount on CG-OoO, and the Tachyum is mentioned only in passing.

https://medium.com/@veedrac/to-reinvent-the-processor-671139a4a034

A commentary on some of the more unusual OoO architectures in the works with focus on Mill Computing's belt machines.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday May 14 2019, @08:37PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday May 14 2019, @08:37PM (#843580) Journal

    In addition to what has been said above, there's still room for improvement:

    • At least two more major node shrinks can be done with known transistor designs.
    • Both AMD and Intel are moving to "chiplet" design which keeps yields high while boosting core counts.
    • Stacked DRAM on chips and memory controllers.
    • DRAM integrated into a 3D package with the CPU.
    • Other improvements such as new transistor designs.

    These apply to other processor designs, but they will have the effect of boosting x86 performance, perhaps by orders of magnitude. More free lunch, less talk about breaking compatibility with existing software.

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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday May 14 2019, @09:38PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Tuesday May 14 2019, @09:38PM (#843603)

    More free lunch, less talk about breaking compatibility with existing software.

    Mill doesn't break compatibility with existing software. That's their main selling point over the different capability-based designs out there.

    In addition to what has been said above, there's still room for improvement...

    While I generally agree the x86 will be slowly dying over a few decades, similar points were raised to dismiss ARM's dominance in the high-end smartphones as Intel introduced their Atoms.

    And IBM is getting serious with OpenPOWER and their PR guys are starting to target consumers now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt8cu8IMLOM [youtube.com]

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