What Is Apple's Macroscalar Architecture?

cs.washington.edu

44 pointssamps3 comments

Just finished my first Computer Architecture & Organization class, and after reading this article, I now have 6-7 more tabs open with wikipedias on the slew of acronyms he uses. A very well written article that I'm pretty sure just turned my night into wikipedia night

How does this stuff differ from the way GPU shader compilers extract ILP today? For example, IIRC, AMD GPUs compiler will already examine a given instruction stream, split it up into homogenous instruction groups (called clauses) and pack them tightly into oodles of VLIW units based on dependency graph information.

Is this just another case of Apple giving existing practice a new name, and shepherding a patent through the USPTO?

The article would appear to answer your question: "It’s a high-level microarchitecture style: an alternative, rather than an extension, to today’s pervasive out-of-order superscalar designs, VLIW architectures, or vector machines."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com