Mill Computing, Inc. Forums Announcements Events What's New?

  • Author
    Posts
  • casten
    Participant
    Post count: 4
    #1487 |

    Heya Mill folks,

    What’s new? Any new talks planned? When will there be enough patents filed so the public can start looking at simulators, compilers, etc.? I’d love to start playing around!

    -Casten

  • Will_Edwards
    Moderator
    Post count: 98

    Why yes, its been excitingly busy at the mill recently and we will get to share that and be excitingly busy in public too soon!

    We are very very very close to publishing ISA specs and there are more talks scheduled. As usual, subscribe to the mailing list or visit the forums regularly to get details.

    Ivan will give a keynote at this year’s Open Source Days in Copenhagen: http://www.opensourcedays.org/2014/ – finally a chance for us Europeans to hear him live.

  • Joe Taber
    Participant
    Post count: 25

    If anyone’s interested I managed to find the RSS feed url for the whole forum. It’s not very active at the moment so it’s easy to keep up with it in my RSS reader, NewsBlur. If you want additional options like filtering sub forums etc, I believe this uses the built-in wordpress rss engine so a quick search for additional query parameters might work, though at the current volume that’s hardly necessary.

    http://millcomputing.com/?feed=rss2&post_type=forum

  • LarryP
    Participant
    Post count: 78

    Greetings all,

    I seem to recall reading (months?) of an upcoming presentation on the abstract Mill, viewed as a virtual machine. If I recall, this was by somebody other than Ivan, possibly not an official Millcomputing person. (Please forgive me if I’m mis-remembering, my memory of what I read is hazy.)

    Unvarnished opinion: The most popular VMs (e.g. those for Java) use a stack model, imposing a one-at-a-time execution model. I believe that the stack-based JVM is a main reason why Java performance isn’t so hot.

    Does this ring a bell with anybody? If so, any pointers to an abstract, slides and/or video would be much appreciated.
    —-

    Bye the way, the Wiki (although it’s pre-official-announcement-of-readiness) now has — when it’s up — some fascinating new-to-me info on, among other things:

    * The instruction set,

    * The Mill abstract assembler grammar (Interestingly IMHO, it exposes few Mill-ish aspects other than supported widths and gangs),

    * More on instruction decoding,

    * Two new phases, and

    * More detail on the tin, copper, silver and gold cores, including more slot and FU details. (Note that these are almost certainly in flux.)

    Enjoy!

    PS Millcomputing folks. Please feel free to delete this post if I’ve mentioned things you’d rather not yet have on the forums. If so, my apologies.

    • Will_Edwards
      Moderator
      Post count: 98

      an upcoming presentation on the abstract Mill, viewed as a virtual machine. If I recall, this was by somebody other than Ivan, possibly not an official Millcomputing person

      I think you might mean Terje Mathisen’s talk “Are virtual machines the future?” at NNUG, Oslo, Norway on the 22nd September? Terje is absolutely an official Millcomputing person ๐Ÿ™‚ Fortunately the talk was videoed.

      Terje did another talk at Trondheim on the 21st October. This one was allegedly videoed too, but we haven’t seen the video yet.

      Just last week Ivan gave a talk in Copenhagen, and this too was videoed – I was there and saw the cameras – but again we haven’t yet got our hands on the tapes yet.

      Of course everyone is subscribed to the mailing list already right?

      On the 21st November 2014 Terje Mathisen will be giving a Mill CPU talk at http://buildstuff.lt/ Vilnius, Lithuania. And on the 10th December I will be giving at talk in Tallinn, Estonia. There’s also likely a talk in December at Microsoft, Seattle provisionally compiler-themed.

      So the year isn’t over yet! ๐Ÿ˜€

      Re wiki, glad its being discovered and explored ๐Ÿ™‚ Its very much an ongoing project and will grow.

      PS Millcomputing folks. Please feel free to delete this post if Iโ€™ve mentioned things youโ€™d rather not yet have on the forums. If so, my apologies.

      LOL no fear ๐Ÿ™‚

      • This reply was modified 9 years, 4 months ago by  Will_Edwards. Reason: Updated with link to video
  • LarryP
    Participant
    Post count: 78

    Will,

    Thanks for your answer; Terje Mathisenโ€™s talk โ€œAre virtual machines the future?โ€ is exactly what I was looking for!

    I’m pleased to report that somebody did record that talk and it’s up on vimeo at:
    http://vimeo.com/108094559 (at least for now. You folks might want to download it and put it on your own website.)

    FYI, here’s the abstract:

    Mill Computing has been working for over a decade to develop a brand new, highly scalable CPU architecture. The scalability is partly achieved by having no fixed machine/assembly language, instead all programs are compiled to an intermediate (VM) machine. Upon installation on the actual target machine, a specializer is run which converts the intermediate representation into the current format. The Mill’s most unique features include having no actual registers, the ability to run completely out of cache with no actual RAM memory, an instruction set which is size-agnostic (the same opcode can work on 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128-bit variables or vectors) as well as being able to unroll algorithms in a way that would cause traps and crashes on classic architectures.

    • Will_Edwards
      Moderator
      Post count: 98

      Thank you kindly for finding and sharing with us, Larry ๐Ÿ™‚

      I’ve sent out polite enquiries to the organisers of the more recent talks and hopefully we’ll track down the other videos soon too.

      If anyone spots them before us please do post here!

  • BeardPower
    Participant
    Post count: 5

    Hi,

    It has been a while since the latest news/updates/talks, so I wanted to ask about the current status of the project.
    Is there any exciting stuff in the pipe or info you can share (e.g. status of the (cloud)-simulator, financing, upcoming talks)?

    It’s much appreciated. Thanks!

  • Ivan Godard
    Keymaster
    Post count: 689

    Upcoming talk, on the Mill response to the Spectre family of attacks, at the Strange Loop Conference in St. Louis September 26-29.

    Progress on other fronts is currently hush-hush.

    • BeardPower
      Participant
      Post count: 5

      Very interesting! Marked it on my calendar.

      “hush-hush” sounds promising ๐Ÿ™‚

You must be logged in to reply to this topic.