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>> The BOOM cores (also available for free) are closing in on the ARM high end performance metrics. ... match or beat the performance of the best Intel or AMD c

• phkahler 9y ago
  >> How does this happen, when many/most good ideas in cpu design(a mature industry) should be patented by now? The RISC-V instruction set was designed to be free of any existing patent issues and with no specific implementation in mind. The opcode formats were designed with hardware implementation in mind however (minimizing the number of multiplexers and such). The big ideas in implementation have been around for a long time. Boom is a multiple-issue out of order core, but nothing about it looks particularly novel yet. It could still benefit from result forwarding and some other things, but that's an old concept too. I think lot of patents in processors tend to revolve around things that are specific to the ISA rather than broad concepts. The reason for that is that we've been making computers for 50 years now so many of the major concepts are rather old already. I may be off base here too. I wouldn't be surprised if things like a micro-op cache are still patented, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that concept is 35 years old either. It may be that getting top performance does require patented ideas, but I'd be thrilled if Intel or AMD gave it their best shot. It would probably perform better than their x86 offerings on regular code.