Open processors are gaining followers
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In a world dominated by intellectual property, some companies are beginning to consider adopting open ISAs to avoid having to sign contracts with dozens of developers and save on development costs. The most popular open architectures are Power, MIPS, and RISC-V.
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I still remember the processor that Linus's company released that changed code as needed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransmetaGarfield
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I also remember the expectations of this processor in the late 90s. It was featured quite a bit in PC Actual. I believe that today Transmeta is dedicated to selling IPS. What a fiasco that was.
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@Gallina That was the Transmeta Crusoe. They were carried by what could be said to be the embryos of today's tablets and small laptops. If I remember correctly, the failure was in one of their caches.
Regarding the news, let's see if it's true that some tech giant puts real resources into one of those architectures. It would be very interesting to be able to load the chips onto an FPGA to play with it and who knows, maybe something like Linux ends up happening to one of them.
Toda la actualidad en la portada de Hardlimit
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@cobito It was not just a matter of caches. The Crusoe used X86 translation to a VLIW language, and if I remember correctly, they wanted to execute four instructions in parallel, while the Efficeon, the second generation, wanted to execute eight instructions in parallel. In theory, they should work very well, but as with everything, real-time interpretation does not always work as one wants, and you can't always package eight instructions in parallel, especially considering that many functions that run on processors are not parallelizable.
Today it might have worked better, with multithreading programming having developed a lot, but back then it was a suicide and they ended up going bankrupt.
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@kynes said in Open processors are gaining followers:
Today it might have worked better, since multi-threaded programming has developed a lot, but back then it was a suicide and they ended up going bankrupt.
I think that's where their problem was. They were visionaries, but the technology we have now didn't exist. The 8 instructions in parallel, will that be what AMD wants to use now to increase their performance in the ryzen 3?
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@garfield said in Open processors are gaining followers:
@kynes said in Open processors are gaining followers:
Today it might have worked better, since multi-threaded programming has developed a lot, but back then it was a suicide and they ended up going bankrupt.
I think that's where their problem was. They were visionaries, but the technology that we have now didn't exist. The thing with 8 instructions in parallel, is that what AMD wants to use now to increase their performance in the ryzen 3?
From what I've read, not exactly. I think what AMD wants to do is what IBM does with the Power, like a hyperthreading of 4 threads per core to take advantage of the units that are not active, and widen the cores with more decoding units, integer, floating point... not 2 as until now. They are still 64-bit instructions that internally distributes them and executes them as it can.
Transmeta's thing was more heavy, their instructions internally were 256 bits, to package 8 of 32 bits per cycle, so if they couldn't parallelize in the interpreter, they put nop instructions to fill in.
