4 ms·

If I remember right, the thing that stopped people in their tracks was patents, not necessarily technology.

by analognoise 5y ago

jlokier 5y ago
Indeed, it may not be a coincidence that the M1 was released about the same time as Transmeta's patents expired.
- monocasa 5y ago
  It wouldn't have been Transmeta's patents, but older ones. IBM's DAISY and HP's Dynamo stand out, but there are probably even older examples depending on what exactly is being patented. The original Rosetta used the same underlying tech with the exception of the memory model stuff, but Transmeta never had to deal with that since they only handled single cores. (And Sparc shipped TSO/WMO switch from a control register all the way back in the mid 90s).
  - sitkack 5y ago
    FX!32 predates Rosetta. I don't think Transmeta's patents stopped any innovation here. I think it has more to do with technical difficult and social and political issues within an org. The fact that Apple has pulled off an ISA change multiple times is quit e amazing. Programmer's got cut off from the microcode starting in the 80s, had this not been the case, I think we would have seen more activity lower in the stack. ISA lockin is a much smaller issue now. DAISY https://www.microarch.org/micro33/tutorial/tutorial.html https://www.microarch.org/micro33/tutorial/tutorial.html FX!32 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.23.2907 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.23.2...
    - analognoise 5y ago
      You can still write microcode! You just have to design the whole processor yourself. I've recently been studying AM2900 (bit-slice) processor design. There are still people out there putting microcoded systems together on FPGAs! I am investigating it, because I think there might be some useful design aspects that could be re-used, but mostly out of retro computing interest :)
      - sitkack 5y ago
        Yeah, the AM2900 series is fascinating, the devices themselves are totally unavailable, which is fine, fpgas are cheap and ubiquitous. It would be a great project to reimplment the parts in an HDL! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900#Members_of_the_Am2900_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900#Members_of_the_Am29... There are two other branches of system design which are really interesting * CGRAs, Course Grain Reconfigurable Architecture [1] * FPGA Overlays [2] [1] https://cgra-me.ece.utoronto.ca/ https://cgra-me.ece.utoronto.ca/ [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6239797 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6239797 https://www.seekdl.org/conferences/paper/details/9227 https://www.seekdl.org/conferences/paper/details/9227 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-efficient-FPGA-overlay-for-portable-custom-set-Koch-Beckhoff/2d0422cc490db8b2069134f27bde85c9458af8e8 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-efficient-FPGA-over...

If I remember right, the thing that stopped people in their tracks was patents, not necessarily technology.

jlokier 5y ago

Indeed, it may not be a coincidence that the M1 was released about the same time as Transmeta's patents expired.

monocasa 5y ago
It wouldn't have been Transmeta's patents, but older ones. IBM's DAISY and HP's Dynamo stand out, but there are probably even older examples depending on what exactly is being patented. The original Rosetta used the same underlying tech with the exception of the memory model stuff, but Transmeta never had to deal with that since they only handled single cores. (And Sparc shipped TSO/WMO switch from a control register all the way back in the mid 90s).
- sitkack 5y ago
  FX!32 predates Rosetta. I don't think Transmeta's patents stopped any innovation here. I think it has more to do with technical difficult and social and political issues within an org. The fact that Apple has pulled off an ISA change multiple times is quit e amazing. Programmer's got cut off from the microcode starting in the 80s, had this not been the case, I think we would have seen more activity lower in the stack. ISA lockin is a much smaller issue now. DAISY https://www.microarch.org/micro33/tutorial/tutorial.html https://www.microarch.org/micro33/tutorial/tutorial.html FX!32 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.23.2907 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.23.2...
  - analognoise 5y ago
    You can still write microcode! You just have to design the whole processor yourself. I've recently been studying AM2900 (bit-slice) processor design. There are still people out there putting microcoded systems together on FPGAs! I am investigating it, because I think there might be some useful design aspects that could be re-used, but mostly out of retro computing interest :)
    - sitkack 5y ago
      Yeah, the AM2900 series is fascinating, the devices themselves are totally unavailable, which is fine, fpgas are cheap and ubiquitous. It would be a great project to reimplment the parts in an HDL! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900#Members_of_the_Am2900_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900#Members_of_the_Am29... There are two other branches of system design which are really interesting * CGRAs, Course Grain Reconfigurable Architecture [1] * FPGA Overlays [2] [1] https://cgra-me.ece.utoronto.ca/ https://cgra-me.ece.utoronto.ca/ [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6239797 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6239797 https://www.seekdl.org/conferences/paper/details/9227 https://www.seekdl.org/conferences/paper/details/9227 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-efficient-FPGA-overlay-for-portable-custom-set-Koch-Beckhoff/2d0422cc490db8b2069134f27bde85c9458af8e8 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-efficient-FPGA-over...