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My feeling is that processor development essentially came to a halt because the fruits of Moore's law were being used to design an ever "better" core that looke
by dewster 10y ago
My feeling is that processor development essentially came to a halt because the fruits of Moore's law were being used to design an ever "better" core that looked for all the world like a single core sequential machine. Was compiler technology holding back the hardware?
I think the best way forward is to tightly integrate simple rigidly multi-threaded processors (where the stages of the pipeline ARE the threads - barrel processing) into the memory itself. Screw all the caching, interconnect, branch prediction, etc. - what has is done for us lately?
- protomikron 10y ago> Screw all the caching, interconnect, branch prediction, etc. - what has is done for us lately? What have the Romans ever done for us? - caching: better performance; performance critical code is mostly memory constrained (your CPU is waiting for stuff), so huge caches are huuuge. I think "cache-friendly" code is one of the most important features in code for modern HW. - branch prediction: again, performance; low-level code is filled with branches that check for mostly unlikely, but nevertheless critical events; if I am correct modern designs go many miles to achieve a high prediction-score However I agree with you that a different approach might be a good idea that is maybe more useful for modern languages. > [...] is to tightly integrate simple rigidly multi-threaded processors [...] AFAIK this has been tried, but the "integrating" or connecting is far from trivial. I've read about a newish design called the Mill (it was on HN some years ago) and it sounded really interesting. Actually, I have to check how far they progressed, last time it was still not production ready and in simulation stage. //edit: http://millcomputing.com http://millcomputing.com