6 ms·

Is it reasonably to still not be running on an FPGA after like 12+ years of working on it?

pjc50 10y ago
It seems that they're working on it somewhat part-time, and have prioritised getting the patents first. Which makes some sense as it's their only way to avoid being instantly destroyed by Intel.
- willvarfar 10y ago
  (Mill team) Too right! 2017 is the year we get funding to go full-time and implement what we've been plotting at our Tuesday evening meetings for 10 years :)
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    And when you show a reference design for a smart phone with provably strong security capabilities its going to get very real indeed. Kudos for continuing the push toward real parts.
  - DennisP 10y ago
    Hmm, if you had a model with 128-bit words that skipped floating point, and left out the sneaky stuff that makes some people distrust Intel and AMD processors, you'd have an almost ideal chip for Ethereum nodes. (Make it 256-bit words and it'd really be ideal.) Not that that's a huge market at this point, but apparently there's a lot of Fortune 500 interest so maybe that'll change by the time you're in production.
  - rogerbinns 10y ago
    Something I don't see mentioned on your site is the rest of the hardware. Specifically is Mill intended to more of a co-processor with computing work handed over to it, or is it standalone in a system. If standalone what is the situation over bootup (eg UEFI or equivalent) and controllers like PCIe, USB, storage (NVME, SATA etc), NICs etc.
    - baobrien 10y ago
      AFAIK, It's intended as a general purpose processor.
- pkaye 10y ago
  But if you wait long enough your earlier ideas can no longer be patented due to prior art.
- igodard 10y ago
  Evolutionary development you can start at once, because you are building on what you had before; think an x86 generation. Evolution works if you already dominate a market and only need to run a little faster than your competitor. Evolution can be scheduled; tick-tock. A newcomer can't sell yet another me-too, even with evolutionary improvement. Instead the newcomer has to rethink and create from first principles if it is to have any chance in the market. Rethinks can't be scheduled; they take as long as they take. Ours has taken longer than I'd hoped, but adding resources like more people to the project would have just slowed us down, or forced us to market with a broken product. The Mill rethink stage is over, and we now can have reasonable schedules and put in more resources; that's why we are going out for a significant funding round this year, our first over $10M.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    That doesn't sound right even though I support your niche strategy. Many of the successful companies had me too priducts with incremental, ecosystem, or marketing improvements. Intel did with x86 starting as an incremental improvement. AMD turned into huge company doing it to x86. Transmeta and Centaur did well adding power efficiency among other things. Quite a few vendors implemented POWER variants with many acquired or still doing good business. There's plenty of it on software side, too, with the proprietary DOS's and UNIX's. Foreign cloners stayed doing it with mainframes and embedded CPU's. So, incremental stuff (esp patented) can certainly grab market share and generate revenue. It's been going on for some time even in CPU market even with dominant players.
    - igodard 10y ago
      Yes - by those with established businesses. I can't think of a startup that succeeded with an initial incremental, at lease since Amdahl. It's also hard to do an increment: the Intel teams are not dumb, and many could and have built far better processors than Intel has - but not while keeping compatibility and Intel's ROI and marketing and pricing structure. TransMeta tried - RIP. There's also personal strategy involved. If we had done a better X86 we would have needed huge dollops of money to crack the front door of the market - c.f. TransMeta - and lost ownership of the company. By going for the disruptive approach we still own all of it - and funding rounds now are at a valuation that will keep us making our own mistakes, not someone else's. That matters to me, enough to go without paycheck for a decade. YMMV.
phkahler 10y ago
If they run it on an FPGA the game will be over. The first questions to ask are how it compares in terms of performance and gate count to other architectures running some benchmarks. In particular they need to compare it to RISC V which is deliberately not patent encumbered and seems to be killing it in performance per area and per watt. I can't say for certain that they'll fail. Maybe they'd be twice as good, but anything short of that and I just don't see viability.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Their claim was ~10x improvement in performance / power compared to existing general-purpose CPUs. > If they run it on an FPGA the game will be over. Huh?
  - phkahler 10y ago
    That's great then. An FPGA implementation should be able to validate that. Even a fraction of that 10x improvement could change the world. So why does it take so long to benchmark an actual implementation? That's a rhetorical question, people implement CPUs in FPGAs all the time and this one is supposed to be simpler. There really is no excuse for it to take so long. They need to stop talking about their project and actually show us something.
    - renox 10y ago
      > That's a rhetorical question, people implement CPUs in FPGAs all the time and this one is supposed to be simpler. Huh? You're not serious.. The Mill is definitively not simpler than many other CPUs (in order CPUs for example), what it is supposed to have is better performance or more exactly better performance/power ratio.
      - protomikron 10y ago
        I am not sure. I heard about the Mill some years ago and watched some presentations about the belt and my feeling was that it would be simpler to map functional languages onto it. Maybe that was more wishful interpretation, but if I remember correctly the idea is to put more logic into the compiler (good old "sufficiently smart compiler") to do the optimization than do it at runtime in HW. IMHO this implies less logic in the HW which might make the implementation simpler (I am SW guy so my computer architecture knowledge might we skewed). Further more I believe that we might be able to infer more and more bounds about runtime behavior that could possibly give rise to more aggressive optimizations. In particular the Mill provides more predictable performance than traditional architectures which is a feature in itself as it e.g. simplifies (again IMHO) real-time programming. So that's why I believe the implementation hasn't to be at least harder than traditional architectures. I am really looking forward to see some results and admire their effort.

pjc50 10y ago

It seems that they're working on it somewhat part-time, and have prioritised getting the patents first. Which makes some sense as it's their only way to avoid being instantly destroyed by Intel.

willvarfar 10y ago
(Mill team) Too right! 2017 is the year we get funding to go full-time and implement what we've been plotting at our Tuesday evening meetings for 10 years :)
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  And when you show a reference design for a smart phone with provably strong security capabilities its going to get very real indeed. Kudos for continuing the push toward real parts.
- DennisP 10y ago
  Hmm, if you had a model with 128-bit words that skipped floating point, and left out the sneaky stuff that makes some people distrust Intel and AMD processors, you'd have an almost ideal chip for Ethereum nodes. (Make it 256-bit words and it'd really be ideal.) Not that that's a huge market at this point, but apparently there's a lot of Fortune 500 interest so maybe that'll change by the time you're in production.
- rogerbinns 10y ago
  Something I don't see mentioned on your site is the rest of the hardware. Specifically is Mill intended to more of a co-processor with computing work handed over to it, or is it standalone in a system. If standalone what is the situation over bootup (eg UEFI or equivalent) and controllers like PCIe, USB, storage (NVME, SATA etc), NICs etc.
  - baobrien 10y ago
    AFAIK, It's intended as a general purpose processor.
pkaye 10y ago
But if you wait long enough your earlier ideas can no longer be patented due to prior art.
igodard 10y ago
Evolutionary development you can start at once, because you are building on what you had before; think an x86 generation. Evolution works if you already dominate a market and only need to run a little faster than your competitor. Evolution can be scheduled; tick-tock. A newcomer can't sell yet another me-too, even with evolutionary improvement. Instead the newcomer has to rethink and create from first principles if it is to have any chance in the market. Rethinks can't be scheduled; they take as long as they take. Ours has taken longer than I'd hoped, but adding resources like more people to the project would have just slowed us down, or forced us to market with a broken product. The Mill rethink stage is over, and we now can have reasonable schedules and put in more resources; that's why we are going out for a significant funding round this year, our first over $10M.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  That doesn't sound right even though I support your niche strategy. Many of the successful companies had me too priducts with incremental, ecosystem, or marketing improvements. Intel did with x86 starting as an incremental improvement. AMD turned into huge company doing it to x86. Transmeta and Centaur did well adding power efficiency among other things. Quite a few vendors implemented POWER variants with many acquired or still doing good business. There's plenty of it on software side, too, with the proprietary DOS's and UNIX's. Foreign cloners stayed doing it with mainframes and embedded CPU's. So, incremental stuff (esp patented) can certainly grab market share and generate revenue. It's been going on for some time even in CPU market even with dominant players.
  - igodard 10y ago
    Yes - by those with established businesses. I can't think of a startup that succeeded with an initial incremental, at lease since Amdahl. It's also hard to do an increment: the Intel teams are not dumb, and many could and have built far better processors than Intel has - but not while keeping compatibility and Intel's ROI and marketing and pricing structure. TransMeta tried - RIP. There's also personal strategy involved. If we had done a better X86 we would have needed huge dollops of money to crack the front door of the market - c.f. TransMeta - and lost ownership of the company. By going for the disruptive approach we still own all of it - and funding rounds now are at a valuation that will keep us making our own mistakes, not someone else's. That matters to me, enough to go without paycheck for a decade. YMMV.

phkahler 10y ago

If they run it on an FPGA the game will be over. The first questions to ask are how it compares in terms of performance and gate count to other architectures running some benchmarks. In particular they need to compare it to RISC V which is deliberately not patent encumbered and seems to be killing it in performance per area and per watt. I can't say for certain that they'll fail. Maybe they'd be twice as good, but anything short of that and I just don't see viability.

jacobolus 10y ago
Their claim was ~10x improvement in performance / power compared to existing general-purpose CPUs. > If they run it on an FPGA the game will be over. Huh?
- phkahler 10y ago
  That's great then. An FPGA implementation should be able to validate that. Even a fraction of that 10x improvement could change the world. So why does it take so long to benchmark an actual implementation? That's a rhetorical question, people implement CPUs in FPGAs all the time and this one is supposed to be simpler. There really is no excuse for it to take so long. They need to stop talking about their project and actually show us something.
  - renox 10y ago
    > That's a rhetorical question, people implement CPUs in FPGAs all the time and this one is supposed to be simpler. Huh? You're not serious.. The Mill is definitively not simpler than many other CPUs (in order CPUs for example), what it is supposed to have is better performance or more exactly better performance/power ratio.
    - protomikron 10y ago
      I am not sure. I heard about the Mill some years ago and watched some presentations about the belt and my feeling was that it would be simpler to map functional languages onto it. Maybe that was more wishful interpretation, but if I remember correctly the idea is to put more logic into the compiler (good old "sufficiently smart compiler") to do the optimization than do it at runtime in HW. IMHO this implies less logic in the HW which might make the implementation simpler (I am SW guy so my computer architecture knowledge might we skewed). Further more I believe that we might be able to infer more and more bounds about runtime behavior that could possibly give rise to more aggressive optimizations. In particular the Mill provides more predictable performance than traditional architectures which is a feature in itself as it e.g. simplifies (again IMHO) real-time programming. So that's why I believe the implementation hasn't to be at least harder than traditional architectures. I am really looking forward to see some results and admire their effort.