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I've talked with the Mill folks, and while I find their architecture intellectually/academically interesting, I just don't think that stack machines will ever t

I've talked with the Mill folks, and while I find their architecture intellectually/academically interesting, I just don't think that stack machines will ever take off. We've stuck to the tried and true von Neumann, while dramatically increasing memory bandwidth within a core, throughout a chip, and when connecting multiple chips, along with enforcing strict determinism at a hardware level, which is why our compilers work. We have one ACM paper published that is intentionally vague, but describes at a high level our scratchpad (software managed) memory techniques... we'll be talking the specifics of our full toolchain later this summer when we have a full public unveiling of the architecture. Another problem with Mill is that they have been around for a little over 10 years, and have not released anything publicly (though have given a number of very detailed talks). They have had a lot of trouble getting their design into FPGAs, and even more trouble with having working compilers. When I started REX, I believed in getting it into silicon as fast as possible, as that is the point when people would take us seriously. We closed funding in July of 2015, and are taping out our first silicon next month... While many have called us crazy (and we will be giving real information on why we are not that crazy), I definitely don't want to be called vaporware.

pohl 11y ago
In what sense is the Mill a stack machine?
- trsohmers 11y ago
  The "belt" is very reminiscent of a stack. I was generalizing, but it is much closer to the traditional stack machine in terms of execution without registers than a load/store based RISC machine like every other mainstream architecture is at this point... Even though x86 is technically a CISC ISA, the actual mainstream implementations of it are RISC internally. At least for myself and my computer architecture friends/colleagues, most of us just throw Mill into the stack machine box even if it is not entirely true... the benefits of the Belt architecture over the traditional stack machine are there in concept, but Mill has also not released any real concrete information on their compilers (at least from what I have seen).

pohl 11y ago

In what sense is the Mill a stack machine?

trsohmers 11y ago
The "belt" is very reminiscent of a stack. I was generalizing, but it is much closer to the traditional stack machine in terms of execution without registers than a load/store based RISC machine like every other mainstream architecture is at this point... Even though x86 is technically a CISC ISA, the actual mainstream implementations of it are RISC internally. At least for myself and my computer architecture friends/colleagues, most of us just throw Mill into the stack machine box even if it is not entirely true... the benefits of the Belt architecture over the traditional stack machine are there in concept, but Mill has also not released any real concrete information on their compilers (at least from what I have seen).