Oh, the fact that the pipeline is exposed means that future changes to the pipeline would would either have to break binary compatibility or be intensely painfu

Oh, the fact that the pipeline is exposed means that future changes to the pipeline would would either have to break binary compatibility or be intensely painful in some other way. The Mill family they're proposing isn't even binary compatible with itself! There are lots of areas where that doesn't matter so much, but I don't see them ever making major inroads into the PC market for that reason. Or maybe I'm wrong and virtual machines and LLVM are going to eat the world and people won't distribute binaries anymore except for the OS and systems library which you might actually be able to recompile for different versions. I think them succeeding in making a processor that can run a real application really fast is quite plausible. Actual commercial success is much less likely. EDIT: Well, I could see the Mill challenging MIPS for dominance in routers, say. Or in a Tivo.