The original of this discussion was a blog post on kevmod.com. I posted the following comment on that blog, repeated here verbatim as possibly of general intere

The original of this discussion was a blog post on kevmod.com. I posted the following comment on that blog, repeated here verbatim as possibly of general interest: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Your skepticism is completely justified. The Mill may never reach market – we are a startup, and most startups fail; its a fact of life. Although we’ve survived for over a decade, which is pretty good for startups these days. But it sounds like you are less skeptical about Mill Computing the company, but more about Mill the technology and architecture. There are fewer ground to doubt that. As fast as we have been able to get the patents filed (I seem to have been doing nothing else for the last two years. I hate patents) we have been completely opening the kimono and showing the technical community, in detail, how each part works. Why? because we wanted outside validation before wasting another decade in something that was fatally flawed in some way we had overlooked. If there was any part of the public Mill that one could point at and say “See? that won’t work, because …” then the web would have been all over us. Buy you know? Skepticism we get, aplenty. What we don’t get is informed skepticism. In fact, the more senior and skilled the commenter, the more they fall in love with the design. Like Andy Glew said one time (and if you don’t know who that is then you are not in the CPU business) – “Yeah, it’ll work, just the way he says it will”. Sometimes people complain that our presentations are insufficiently detailed to fairly evaluate. Guilty as charged; they are oriented for a high level audience interested in the subject, but not for the specialist. However, if you ask for details on our forum (mill computing.com/forum/themill) or the comp.arch newsgroup, as hundreds have, you will get all the details you want until they flood out your ears and collect in puddles on the floor. In these days of internet time, when idea to market is measured in days or weeks, it’s east to forget that not all the economy works that way. Building steel mills, cement plants, and yes, CPU silicon takes a long time and a lot of money. We have deliberately swapped money for time: we are a bootstrap startup, not looking for VC funding. There’s good and bad in that choice: a decade without a paycheck is not easy, but today we own it – all of it – and feel we got a good deal. The proof of the Mill pudding will be when there’s a product with pins on the bottom, and that won’t happen for some years yet. We learned in our first presentation not to make projections of what the eventual chip will have for numbers. Yes, we have guesstimates internally, but we’re quite sure those will be off by a factor of two. The problem is that we have no clue which direction they will be off. If you have the technical chops to understand a CPU design from first principles then please dig as deep as you can into our stuff and tell us – and the world – what you find. Otherwise you will just have to join us as we wait and work and see. We’ve never said anything different. Ivan