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I can't tell if they're extremely bad at executing or whether they've hit a wall on something and the design doesn't actually work. I think if they'd had start
by mhh__ 3y ago
I can't tell if they're extremely bad at executing or whether they've hit a wall on something and the design doesn't actually work.
I think if they'd had started now (/ more recently) and been much more open source-y they'd be in a much better position e.g. it's interesting enough that random autists will work on their toolchain
- jiggawatts 3y agoMill started in 2003 but doesn't seem to have made anything out of silicon. RISC-V started in 2010, had a prototype chip by 2013, and now has dozens of implementations in shipping products. I suspect the Mill project "bit off more than they could chew". They not only had to develop a new chip, but a matching compiler, instruction set generator, and a bunch of other bespoke tooling.
- mhh__ 3y agoPerhaps, but keep in mind that you could make a crappy RISC-V chip (if you were an academic department) in a day just by bolting a new decoder onto some other RISC-y chip whereas the mill is "truly alien" (although alien in a way that is probably easier to make in some sense, in that a naive implementation wouldn't actually need all that much magic behind the scenes semantically at least, I suppose). They did however seem to imply that they didn't even have FPGA models going maybe 5 years ago at this point which did seem pretty bizarre. Perhaps it doesn't actually matter for what they're doing, but you'd think that they (in their supposed pursuit of seed money) would have a blinking LED or something just to have something to show off...