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From an interview with Bob Colwell: 'Anyway this chip architect guy is standing up in front of this group promising the moon and stars. And I finally put my ha
by chasil 1y ago
From an interview with Bob Colwell:
'Anyway this chip architect
guy is standing up in front of this group promising the moon and stars. And I finally put my
hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of
performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut
me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said,
wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a
compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my
simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did
30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this
architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not
mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not
here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on".'
https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf
- panick21_ 1y agoSun had some funny stories around this too. When they came up with their multi-core system, and they used code from 10-15 years earlier for traces. And then said 'well, nobody actually uses floating code' so we don't need it. Of course over those 10 years Floating point became much more common and stand. Leading to a chip that had one FPU for 8 cores, basically meaning, even minimal floating point would destroy concurrency. Arguably Sun had already lose the chip war and this was just making them fall behind further. They did market it in quite well. And a lesser known thing that I couldn't find much information on is that Sun also worked on VLIW chip during the 90s. Apparently Bill Joy was convinced that VLIW was the future so they did a VLIW chip, and the project was lead by David Ditzel. As far as I am aware this was never released. If any Sun veterans have any idea about this, I would love to know.
- chasil 1y agoAs far as the single FPU that you mention, the T1 is an open-source CPU. https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t1-page.html https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t1-pag... The T2 is also open, and places an FPU in each core. https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-page.html https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag... When there is such complaint about closed firmware in the Raspberry Pi, and the risk of the Intel ME and other closed CPU features, I wonder why these open designs are ignored. Yes, the performance and power consumption would be poor by modern standards.
- panick21_ 1y agoThese designed are not ignored. They were used for a few things here and there. But the usefulness of 'over the wall' open code without backing is always a bit limited and for processors that cost 100k to tap out, even more so. By now there are much better more modern design out-there and for RISC-V.
- jecel 1y agoSun's project was an attempt to have a high performance Java processor to replace the simpler PicoJava: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAJC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAJC
- panick21_ 1y agoOh wow. Thanks, I knew they had a Java in Hardware concept, but I thought those were two different projects. Thanks for the link.