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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.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday May 14 2019, @09:13PM (1 child)
It's like trying to explain a register machine to someone who only knows how stack machines work. Would it help saying it's like a VLIW with fat pointers and something similar to the Itanium's register rotation done everywhere? Personally this explanation did nothing so I ended up watching the videos and reading the papers and patent applications. And I still don't understand a lot of it for the simple fact they still haven't fully explained much of it while they're still releasing patents or how they're going to resolve the the optimization issues that held back the Itanium.
Anyhow, the article spends over 1000 words covering and comparing the basic concepts between the Belt and OoO before even getting into the main subject so unless you want me to just paste all of that...
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 14 2019, @10:32PM
I guess everything old is new again, when new generation of "investors" born after Itanic tanked is gearing to burn their $$$ without mommy's control at last.