Comment by mhkool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhkool | Hacker News Reader

The "new processor" is already being developed. Mill computing is designing the Mill CPU and made 13 videos so far on Youtube explaining most characteristics of the new CPU. The CPU is on par with the latest Xeon, uses 10x less power, and has many great features that enhance performance and security a lot. For example, portals calls are function calls from protection domains to another protection domain and automagically only allow the parameters to be read by the callee and the results be read by the caller. The rest of the data of the other protection domain cannot be accessed. The stack is also secure since there are 2 stacks: one holds all data that one normally find on a stack and is modifiable by the program and the second stack is a hardware-managed stack with the return addresses which is hidden from software. Also the protection on the stack changes with each call and each return such that a stack overflow results in an immediate fault. The CPU has many more features, too many to name here.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Being on par with the latest Xeon, while using 10x less power, is an absurd claim.

Moores law is well and truly dead.

That's one design cycle == 10x improvement.

So not unreasonable within the context of the history of the industry.

The proof will be in the product when it ships.

So there's no proof and the persistent pro-Mill posts are wishcasting?

Glad we cleared that up.

> The CPU is on par with the latest Xeon, uses 10x less power, and has many great features that enhance performance and security a lot.

Here's the last two companies to spout this line of garbage: Transmeta and SiByte. Remember them?

Your statement implies that the Intel engineers have left a lot of design on the table. I assure you, this hasn't been true for quite a long time (circa 1996, arguably, but certainly not since 2000--that's why both Transmeta and SiByte failed).

The simple answer to this is: graph the active area vs power consumed for all the chips of a particular technology node. Unless Intel is significantly below that line, you're not going to beat them by much.

> Your statement implies that the Intel engineers have left a lot of design on the table.

The Mill folks would rather argue that Intel's problem is they aren't leaving things on the table—instead, they're shoving tons of extra machinery into their core designs while the Mill tries to avoid extremely power-hungry performance enhancing techniques like speculative out of order execution.

> graph the active area vs power consumed for all the chips of a particular technology node

Setting aside the difficulties of accounting for differences between different manufacturer's processes at the same node, this still isn't a very informative measure. Active areas of the chip don't all make the same contribution to performance. Speculative execution can light up a lot of silicon executing instructions that don't actually need to be executed.

I'm quite skeptical that the Mill guys will ever produce a core that beats Intel on raw performance, but they have plenty of convincing arguments for why their power consumption will be much lower, and I think it's plausible that they will be able to beat Intel on performance per watt for some workloads.

> Mill tries to avoid extremely power-hungry performance enhancing techniques like speculative out of order execution.

Go look at Alpha 21164 vs x86 in the timeframe. You don't save as much as you think (and Intel's designs were much shoddier back then).

> Setting aside the difficulties of accounting for differences between different manufacturer's processes at the same node, this still isn't a very informative measure.

You would think so, but the graph is remarkably consistent. Just because a measure has noise does not make it a useless measure.

Intel could be significantly below the curve. But beating the curve is ferociously difficult.

Although the mythical improvements never materialized, at the very least Transmeta manged to ship a commercially viable CPU using some trully innovative technology, so I think it is unfair to bucket them together with the rest.

> The CPU is on par with the latest Xeon, uses 10x less power (...)

When you say the CPU do you mean a working ASIC? Some simulation? Or a plan to make one?

And how do you compare them if they have completely different instructions set?

A quick skim on wikipedia says it's yet another VLIW uarch. What's preventing it from being another Itanium?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com