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A counter-anecdote: The features you listed started shipping (from Intel & MIPS) in microprocessors in 1996, 22 years ago. Intel's out-of-order Pentium Pro was
by zurn 8y ago
A counter-anecdote: The features you listed started shipping (from Intel & MIPS) in microprocessors in 1996, 22 years ago. Intel's out-of-order Pentium Pro was beaten by the in-order DEC 21164 the same year.
Also, there's the case of Intel losing to in-order ARMs in mobile. First with XScale, and later on with the in-order Atoms. (https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/19/how-intel-lost-the-mobile-chip-business-to-apples-ax-arm-application-processors https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/19/how-intel-lost-th...)
- whack 8y agoSure, specific optimizations in specific markets may not be worth the cost they incur. Or they may not be valuable enough to overcome other weaknesses in the project. And yet, if someone tried to sell a server CPU today that was not pipelined, not OOO, and didn't have branch prediction, it would absolutely tank in the marketplace. I never said that performance optimizations should always be implemented. Just that performance optimizations should sometimes take precedence over simplicity.
- ben509 8y ago> And yet, if someone tried to sell a server CPU today that was not pipelined, not OOO, and didn't have branch prediction, it would absolutely tank in the marketplace. You could sell it as a niche product for high security applications, since OOO execution is a nasty side-channel.
- whack 8y agoThat's an interesting idea. A "so simple it can't have bugs" design would never win over the mainstream-market, but it might be able to find a niche among extremely security-conscious users. This might be a great project for the open-source community to take on.