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Well, this seems to fall within the VLIW tradition and has an exposed pipeline like the original VLIW, but there are a bunch of differences. In the original VLIW every instruction pipeline was conceptually a different processor while the Mill is very much unified around it's single belt, though I wonder if you could have a similar design with separate integer and floating point belts.

And instead of having a fixed instruction format the Mill has variable length bundles, which is good. Instruction cache pressure is certainly a traditional weakness of VLIW. So maybe you could say Mill:VLIW::CISC:RISC? But the most important part of RISC was separating memory access from operations and the Mill still certainly does that.



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