3 ms·

I remember watching an interview with Jim Keller, where he explained that they had the front-end team doing RTL for the ARM64 ISA and the x86_64 ISA in parallel

I remember watching an interview with Jim Keller, where he explained that they had the front-end team doing RTL for the ARM64 ISA and the x86_64 ISA in parallel, and independently of the back-end team who were doing the core execution block. I think this was talking about the K12, which as I understand was ultimately never released. Perhaps the modern CPU design space looks a bit like what compilers look like today, with a core that's independent of the front end language/back end target architecture. In which case it might be a lot more modular than one would expect...

hardware2win 3y ago
This? >C: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else? JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun. _______ >Perhaps the modern CPU design space looks a bit like what compilers look like today, with a core that's independent of the front end language/back end target architecture. In which case it might be a lot more modular than one would expect... Well, to be fair thats how you should design software (thus firmware too) stuff, those are good practices.

hardware2win 3y ago

This? >C: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else? JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun. _______ >Perhaps the modern CPU design space looks a bit like what compilers look like today, with a core that's independent of the front end language/back end target architecture. In which case it might be a lot more modular than one would expect... Well, to be fair thats how you should design software (thus firmware too) stuff, those are good practices.