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 Wednesday May 15 2019, @04:10PM
I had to learn electronics on my own but processor design was part of my CS program. It was very basic but one day I picked up a book from the library. Sat down and 4 hours of skip-reading I was caught up with the state of the art until at least 1999.
I promise it's not voodoo check it out.
https://www.ebay.com/p/Digital-Computer-Electronics-by-Jerald-A-Brown-and-Albert-P-Malvino-1992-Hardcover-Revised/506119 [ebay.com]
This book is out of print but if you pick this up and install logisim you'll have a working processor by the end.
The only reason I recommend it is because it's fantastically well written and easy to understand. It's not terribly large either
You don't even need to know a lot of electronics, you can pick that up later.