Hacker News Reader

Comment by fivelessminutes | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be from 20 years ago, the most recent citation was from 2000 and it describes a MIPS chip built on a 1998 process.

View on HN

And not even a mention of AMULET (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor)

Came here to say this.

Nor this one:

https://authors.library.caltech.edu/43698/1/25YearsAgo.pdf

It was the original paper for this that got me interested in building silicon tools

We had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Manohar at a CIRCT weekly discussion session earlier this year. He presented much more recent work if anyone is interested. The talk and discussion was recorded here: https://sifive.zoom.us/rec/play/Bg99_niHh9OG_8uE_nhaz6otxvA0...

EDIT: talk begins around 7 minutes.

Yes, but I thought that it could be interesting to look at research on the topic from 20 years ago to compare it with present progress.

Asynchronous would work better, but we're unlikely to get there -- too big a change.

It's like:

* having ECC everywhere

* having a single display standard (as opposed to HDMI/DisplayPort/USB-C/DVI/VGA/...)

* some kind of architecture where a single bad expansion card (USB, PCIe, etc.) can't crash a whole computer

... and so on

On one hand, no brainer. On the other hand, it hasn't happened.

NVidia is breaking ground on the move to SIMD/MIMD-style architectures, as predicted at the same time, and only because it gives a 30x boost in performance. Async will probably net us a 50% performance boost or something.

> * some kind of architecture where a single bad expansion card (USB, PCIe, etc.) can't crash a whole computer

If you mean IOMMU, we do have that. It doesn't seem completely doable because someone could still plug an etherkiller into the card.

I don't care much about hostile attacks. I just lost a few weeks until I debugged my computer was crashing due to a failing wifi card. I care about that sort of thing. That's totally fixable.

Eh, you probably already have the OS architecture for that. The vendor just isn't using it.

Could you add the publication year in the title of your submission?

(2000)

Added above. Thanks!

Has there been much progress? I remember hearing a lot about asynchronous logic circuits back in the 90s, but don't hear about much in the way of breakthroughs since then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com