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

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @04:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @04:19PM (#843874)

    That was then, this is now. I'm not necessarily suggesting that we need to do this, but these days it's viable to put more than one processor on a single chip. Had Intel been able to do that, there would have been a far greater likelihood of success in this venture. It would have been a temporary lack of progress in speed for a significant increase down the line.

    Or, there's the Apple model where they made all their software capable of running in both modes until there was enough of the new software to remove backwards compatibility.

    Intel just got caught with it's pants down as much as anything.