Mill Computing, Inc. › Forums › Announcements › Events › On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project
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To give context for this post:
– The last Youtube video on the Mill channel is from 2017.
– Arguably, the last video introducing new concepts and not expanding on previous videos is from 2015.
– The last patent filed is from 2018.
– In the 2017 videos, you mention starting a funding round for an FPGA implementation. However, since then, there has been no update of how that round went, whether there has been any progress on the FPGA implementation, etc.Now, I get that the Mill is a large-scale engineering project, that it requires lots of non-trivial work, and that its primary purpose right now isn’t to generate hype.
But it still seems to me that it would be in the best interest of the project to maintain some level of interest, especially when it comes to bringing investors. Right now the consensus on tech forums seems to be that the project is dead. The fact it hasn’t published news in the last 4 years doesn’t help.
Besides, if the intent from the beginning was to not update regularly, it seems odd to have three different subforums dedicated to announcements (“Events”, “In the press”, “Our announcements”). The fact that these three subforums exist (and are linked to from the big “News” link in the website header) but have been completely abandoned for three years communicates that the team initially intended to give regular updates, but has been avoiding progress reports for lack of progress.
Hence my question: Is the Mill project stalled? Is there any progress on the FPGA implementation? Or should people just forget about the project for the coming years?
Mill is not stalled, but is nowhere where we hoped and intended it to be.
By the end of 2018 we had reached the natural point in development for a transition from a small-team invent-and-design effort to a large-team implementation effort. But we only had a small team; the transaction would require a massive new funding round and a pretty thorough reorganization from a sweat-equity basis to a conventional salaried structure with actual management.
We targeted that transition to March 2020, and took some preliminary steps (like closing subscriptions for our Convertible Notes) in late 2019. Our timing was exquisitely awful; you know what happened in spring 2020.
We expect to try the transition this year.
Hello!
It’s been exactly a year and a week since I wrote this thread. Has there been any externally visible progress made since? Eg progress in switching the management structure on in the FPGA implementation, or anything of the sort?
Like… I don’t mean to be rude, but… have you guys done anything at all in the past year with observable results?
Because if not, I don’t see how anyone can take the statement “Mill is not stalled” seriously.
There hasn’t been much news because we have no particular reason to put news out, and some reason to work on code instead of publicity.
The past year has mostly been spent on the uncore and tools; the ISA itself is essentially finished. Uncore includes behind-the-scenes parts of the chip like the PLB, TLB, interrupts, and spiller. Tools include the compiler driver, the post-linker and pre-linker, debug support, documentation, and LLVM intrinsics.
Sometimes it seems to us like it’s taking forever too. As a Stranger said: “Patience; waiting is.”.
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