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Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

The Mill architecture team is working on a static-scheduled architecture, but only time will tell if compilers can reasonably get good enough at it to make it viable. One major problem with static schedules is that if you want more IPC, you generally have to change the ISA or have machine-specific loaders which mutate the code at load time (this is the approach the Mill folks take).

Standard ISAs let you write a program with a linear model, and let the hardware get better at scheduling the micro ops over time, or just let it be linear (as is generally preferred on low end microcontrollers and low-power mobile cores).

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> One major problem with static schedules is that if you want more IPC, you generally have to change the ISA or have machine-specific loaders which mutate the code at load time (this is the approach the Mill folks take).

This isn't a problem with static schedules, it's a problem with VLIWs (well actually any exposed pipeline machine).

(And really not that much of a problem anyways)

The Mill is certainly interesting, and while they still haven't provided a satisfactory answer to the ILP question, I think they may be successful enough anyways due to their other innovations.

> if compilers can reasonably get good enough at it

Do compilers, plural, have to get good at it, or just the Mill team's own LLVM backend?

What about the optimizing compilers in v8? SpiderMonkey (and friends)? JVM/Hotspot? Beam? the CLR/Roslyn? I maybe most of what compiles only on GCC (or MSVC) today could be reasonably ported to compile on Clang or DragonEgg, but there are a lot of compilers in the world these days.

What we're talking about is not the difficulty of making one sufficiently intelligent compiler, but probably something more like six of them, along with every other compiler anyone ever wants to write again.

I don't know about you, but I'm not about to assume that we'll somehow manage to develop and maintain six of something we've never even developed one of. The Mill is no Itanium, but it is very unusual. They haven't even tried to make a normal assembler, their assembler is a C++ template metaprogram which generates the assembler which you then run to get your program.

The impression I get is that their odd assembler is pretty much there for development expedience while they are hand-writing assembly. I can't imagine that their specializer (the thing that runs at install or run time which converts the generic load module to specialized concrete machine code for the processor you have) will produce as an IR form assembly that will then go through a C++ compiler... that would just be crazy. And the weird C++ assembler is definitely for the concrete machine code; the generic form is supposed to be very similar to LLVM IR.

Amongst other things it (a C++ assembler) would be slow as hell and require a huge amount of runtime. Ideally the specializer would be a single binary that would convert a generic load module to a specialized one with no intermediate steps. My guess is that they will generate such a specializer with their current generic specification tools.

You'd be right that the specializer doesn't do the same things as the assembler; and programmable assemblers are the norm, but the crucial difference is that their ISA and ABI make the assembler context-dependent.

Well, their exposed ISA and ABI are probably considered to be genAsm, which is the aforementioned mostly-LLVM-based IR. The concrete machine code will mostly likely only ever be generated by the specializer in the real world. Consider the specializer to be the static software equivalent of the x86-to-uOp decoding core in the hardware of a modern x86. On the one hand it can only make static scheduling decisions, whereas on the other hand it can look at the entire program being translated to make those decisions rather than just the window of instructions the x86 decoder can see during execution.

I really think this is the only path to make a long-term-viable staticly-scheduled architecture. Otherwise you'll wind up with the Itanium problem, which is that you eventually need to rewrite/reorder code internally (in hardware) as your architecture evolves, which kind of removes the advantage of having the static scheduling in the first place.

> I really think this is the only path to make a long-term-viable staticly-scheduled architecture.

You may be right. I think the challenges involved (especially as OOBC is proposing to solve them) defeat the goal. For systems that have no present or future interest in JIT, it might offer somewhat higher peak performance than whatever commodity computers are on the market; for those with JIT (especially with frequent compilation, like in a web browser) I can see it being prohibitive. I don't care how magical their specializer is, it will cost something to run, and cost a lot to integrate (imagine not being able to know the size or entry point of the basic block until you've specialized it, infuriating!). The way they talk about the specializer, it even gives the impression that they don't intend to share the source code, which will be a whole lot of fun when deciding whether or not you trust it to run in the middle of your application.

Yeah, who knows. I mostly think the Mill is a pile of interesting ideas that just might, if they're very lucky, eventually become a product. I'm certainly not holding my breath though.

Regarding their intentions, they've said repeatedly that they want to sell chips. It'd therefore be pretty stupid IMHO to not open up as much as they can the toolchain to get software to run on their chips, including the specializer. For that matter they should definitely also be releasing the chip specification data (insn/op bit patterns, functional unit slot arrangement, latencies, etc) that's used to create the specializer so people can roll their own if they want.

Then again this is the same world where Intel ME is an ultra-suspicious closed blob and you can't get datasheets on tons of chips to save your life, which makes no sense to me either. So I'm probably not a very good judge of what's reasonable.

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