News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors by DeathArrow on Sunday December 17, 2023 @12:39AM (#38670593)
Is it possible to use big and fat CPU registers instead of cache? There might be no wasted clock cycles and no delay.
Re:Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors by Nevermark on Sunday December 17, 2023 @01:51AM (#38670919)
A compiler AND processor design amateur here. (Latter in school.)

Once you have enough registers, having more mean lowers active utilization for any given instruction (bad use of space, vs. fast pipelined access to cached stack) or higher levels of parallel instruction dispatch (much greater complexity, and even greater inefficiency for branching misses).

Then you have to update instruction sets, which could be impossible given how tightly they fit in current instruction sizes.

Ergo, increasing register banks is a major architecture & platform change from hardware to software redesign, with heavy end user impact, and a fair chance of decreasing performance.

In contrast, anything that improves caching performance is a big non-disruptive win.

Re:Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors by als0 on Sunday December 17, 2023 @04:29AM (#38671578)
What about if you use register windows or special renaming of architectural registers to internal ones? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_window
Re:Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors by Nevermark on Sunday December 17, 2023 @11:58PM (#38679390)
The amount of stack in the L1 cache is essentially that. A shifting fast access working memory area.

Then think of registers as just part of the fetch & store pipelines for staging operations on stack values.

Forth goes all in with this approach.

Re:Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors by Dylan16807 on Sunday December 17, 2023 @01:47AM (#38670898)
Registers are quite expensive in space and power, because multiple at once have to be accessible in many places.

If you add more registers, the cost per register increases rapidly, and you very quickly hit your limits.

If you make registers wider, that's still very expensive, and you introduce extra steps to get to your data most of the time.

So no, you can't do that in a reasonable way.

Re:Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors by DeathArrow on Sunday December 17, 2023 @02:00AM (#38670945)
Thank you!
Re:Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors by saati on Sunday December 17, 2023 @07:33AM (#38672423)
CPU registers are either SRAM or even larger flip-flops, they have the same problem.