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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 14 2019, @09:34PM
And it seems like someone had been working on either replacement microcode, or native tools for it. However, if I remember correctly, they changed the microcode design between the original (Crusoe?) and the second generation part(or locked it down?), which caused all the previous work to be useless. And since neither chip was ever readily available, outside of low power and usually expensive notebook and tablet computers, no further interest or development on them took place.
Which is too bad, because something like the Transmeta design, if it was generic enough, would do an excellent job in a multi-core processor for allowing almost native code operation behind something like qemu to allow multi-platform and multi-arch binary execution with the possibility of fast shared memory spaces. While it could have its own share of security risks, it could also mitigate whole classes of security errors and allow the management processor to just be another reprogrammable core in whatever arch you need to program in.