On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project

Re:On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project by monocasa on Sunday July 25, 2021 @01:21PM (#27951031)

It wouldn't have been Transmeta's patents, but older ones. IBM's DAISY and HP's Dynamo stand out, but there are probably even older examples depending on what exactly is being patented.

The original Rosetta used the same underlying tech with the exception of the memory model stuff, but Transmeta never had to deal with that since they only handled single cores. (And Sparc shipped TSO/WMO switch from a control register all the way back in the mid 90s).

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Re:On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project by sitkack on Monday July 26, 2021 @10:52AM (#27960105)

FX!32 predates Rosetta. I don't think Transmeta's patents stopped any innovation here. I think it has more to do with technical difficult and social and political issues within an org. The fact that Apple has pulled off an ISA change multiple times is quit e amazing.

Programmer's got cut off from the microcode starting in the 80s, had this not been the case, I think we would have seen more activity lower in the stack.

ISA lockin is a much smaller issue now.

DAISY https://www.microarch.org/micro33/tutorial/tutorial.html

FX!32 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.23.2...

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Re:On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project by analognoise on Monday July 26, 2021 @02:31PM (#27963296)

You can still write microcode! You just have to design the whole processor yourself.

I've recently been studying AM2900 (bit-slice) processor design. There are still people out there putting microcoded systems together on FPGAs!

I am investigating it, because I think there might be some useful design aspects that could be re-used, but mostly out of retro computing interest :)

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Re:On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project by sitkack on Monday July 26, 2021 @10:48PM (#27968086)

Yeah, the AM2900 series is fascinating, the devices themselves are totally unavailable, which is fine, fpgas are cheap and ubiquitous. It would be a great project to reimplment the parts in an HDL!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900#Members_of_the_Am29...

There are two other branches of system design which are really interesting

    * CGRAs, Course Grain Reconfigurable Architecture [1]
    * FPGA Overlays [2]

[1] https://cgra-me.ece.utoronto.ca/

[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6239797 https://www.seekdl.org/conferences/paper/details/9227 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-efficient-FPGA-over...

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