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, @04:13PM
That was viable back then in a way that it isn't now. Hardware is just that much more complicated. There was a time when you could build your own computer completely from the ground up, it would be more expensive and physically larger, but not necessarily that much slower. These days, there's no way you could do that without access to extremely expensive hardware.
The problem IMHO, is more about the failure of the youngin's to learn from the history that produced what they're using. For instance, it took ages from the concept of a desktop computer as seen in the late '90s to develop. Yes, the analogy was there decades earlier, but there were tons of little adjustments made along the way that have been chucked in the trash because it's not sexy enough.
I'd personally, settle for folks that just understand that a UI is supposed to be largely invisible to the user and that software doesn't need to use up all available resources.