mmeyerlein
hello again, somehow it has become quite calm in the last months around this very unusual project.
i am still very curious about the current status. can you give a big update again?
or how about another talk? they were always very insightful.
ivan
Well, life is what happens when you were planning something else. We were starting to search for our next funding round, as announced, when the virus hit and that whole industry put on its hat and went home.
In some ways the plague is much less a problem for the Mill project than for other businesses. We have always been a distributed virtual company, so we already had work-from-home worked out. And as a sweat-equity organization with a burn rate of zero we have an infinite runway, while so many others are shut down and going bust.
So no news from us is good news, sorta. Thanks for your encouragement.
nick
On the contrary, Marc Andreessen seems to think now is a great time to invest in the future. Wonder if he's actually willing to make those investments or if he's all talk :P. Mill is one of those companies that you don't see very often: redesigning platforms instead of incrementally layering and remixing. I hope things work out well for you guys; you deserve success.
Is the work that's left just a software challenge? Is the funding just for hiring some devs and hitting "print" at the fabs at this point? I feel there should be some markets that just care about raw "on the metal" compute, not established OS support, and maybe an LLVM backend is all they need? My naive guess anyway... I presume you have initial markets in mind.
ivan
I wonder too :-) Realistically, the virus has to settle down a little before doing meetings.
As for the project, the tool chain is usable against our four test configurations; it it no longer on the critical path to product. Software is working on the micro-kernel, and hardware is working on getting the C++ expansions make the right Verilog for all. There's a lot to do, but we are out of research ind into development, and money and talent we can use both of now.
nick
True! I guess you shouldn't be shaking hands with too many folks just yet. I keep forgetting how bad things are in the US -- Australia has it pretty good right now!
Sounds like you're all doing well. Best of luck. I want a Mill in my laptop in 10 years!
mmeyerlein
me again :)
i check in here every few months to see how the mill is developing. i find the ideas and approaches to challenge every aspect of cpu design long overdue, and have not felt present since transputer, itanium or transmeta. i think the world again needs this courage to not always follow the same or very similar path as seen in thousands of scientific papers on cpu design. that's why i accompanied all talks with admiration, and i really enjoy being on the wiki because it's always very inspiring 4 me.
however, in the last 2 1/2 years it has become very quiet and i could imagine that the fanbase starts to erode if i generalize my motivation.
ivan, i find it very informative when you answer triggered, which makes my flame of hope blaze ;)
we ourselves just went through a pandemic with a series b in a similar size, and know how hard it is to get vc money, but it was possible.
so i wanted to ask you if it wouldn't be a good idea to make a virtual talk about the challenges and progress of the last 2 years. not so much a special technical talk, but more a general talk about the company itself?
ivan
Would it be a good idea? Yes. Right now? Well, maybe not.
We were all set to make our move this past spring; shutting down down the Convertible Notes was the last preliminary. A "state of the company" talk would have been part of the active solicitation. You know what happened then. At some point we'll have to say enough is enough and just go do it, but when? There's an argument for not waiting, and there's an argument for waiting, not until everything is better, but at least until everything is stably bad.
Either way, we won't do anything during the summer, which is when the whole finance industry goes on vacation.
And yes, we're frustrated too.
mmeyerlein
i will continue to visit here every few months in the hope that the mill has taken another big step forward.
i see the mill as a coherent overall concept that takes a big step forward instead of the "yet another risc" that the world is celebrating.
ok, i trust the whole mill team not to lose their enthusiasm and hope that such information, which is given again and again on request, will be established in a format of its own, something like a "message from the bridge" newsletter that comes every three months... ;)
phorgan1
Just checking in and saying hi
Patrick
mmeyerlein
hi ;)
mmeyerlein
and the next three months are over ;)
are there some exciting news again?
what about the fpga implementation ?
or some interesting benchmarks?
yes i know, corona, but with such a cool topic you can't sit still, i bet your fingers are tingling a lot, right?
gaby_64
im waiting for more news aswell, the mill cpu is on my "technology's to watch" spreadsheet.
ivan
We expected to go out for a funding round (and convert from bootstrap to salary-paying) last spring but, well, 2020.
Right now we're trying to decide when to make a second try at it. The financial market for the likes of us isn't back yet, and the virus rates are turning up again, which argues for waiting. But the economy and the future market is real iffy, which argues for doing it now.
Comments?
mmeyerlein
from my personal experience i can say that the vc market has been back for a long time, since they took all the stressful companies out of their portfolios in the middle of last year. the really big vc's are even more aggressive in the market than before.
therefore: go go go!
ivan
I'm interested in details. Can you describe that personal experience here, or drop me an email to ivan at millcomputing.com?
peceed
There are tuning issues in the smaller members too, Tin and Copper. There the issue is belt size. Even an 8-position belt is enough for the tests’ transient data, but the codes also have long-lived data too, and the working sets of that data don’t fit on the smaller belts, and some not on the 16-belt of a Silver. As a result the working sets get spilled to scratch and the core essentially runs out of scratch with tons of fill ops; much like codes on original 8086 or DG Nova. This is especially noticeable on FP codes like the numerics library for which the working set is full of big FP constants. Working out of scratch doesn’t impact small-member performance much, but has scratch bandwidth consequences, and power too that we can only guess at. We may need to config the smaller members with bigger belts, but that too has consequences. In other words, the usual tuning tradeoffs.
I think you can use a small register set that is a logical extension of belt, using additional bit in argument address.
Encoding cost is acceptable and it solves problem of "frequently used arguments".
It can be entropy optimized by restricting number of register arguments to one per operation or by limiting number of functional units that can use register arguments. Small models can use more bits for register specifier.
The C++ library is coming up because we are doing the OS kernel in C++
I am under strong impression that you are trying to innovate too much at once.
Your initial goal should be a "software stack accelerator": processor that needs minimal OS modifications and is fully compatible with existing applications (Linux/Java/Android).
Forget single address space: it doesn't save a lot of power (TLB uses ~15% IIRC) but is the biggest blocker in quick adoption. You can easy make it optional.
You can win the market by offering "only" double performance to power and performance to cost ratios, as long as you are software compatible/sane. "Datacenters and smartphones" are sensitive enough to 2-3x power advantage, but they are not able to rewrite their software!
Time is running out - volume of computations is moving into visual/AI domain.
BobC
My brother-in-law works for a small physics startup that in January started looking for another Angel to get through COVID. They wound up getting 3 VCs in March. (The 3 VCs were to ensure share dilution, not to get 3x money.) Not sure how that came to happen (who talked to who), but the money is out there.
mmeyerlein
maybe i should visit here more often ;)
i work in berlin as an interim cto and i have accompanied companies in their series a or b in the last two years. i have dealt with vc's of the size of lightspeed, and of course talked to them a lot about pandemic. all vc's had a lot to do in the beginning of 2020 to quickly clean up their portfolio. from mid 2020 on, however, business continued as normal, and tech companies were never out of focus. at least that is what i had heard several times from the vc's, and also experienced myself.
so i understand that the processes of one's own company have to be adjusted first in the pandemic which didn't simplify the cooperation, but a good team, good founders, a good idea and a good pitch deck provided you can find a vc. i'm not saying it's easy to contact 100+ vc's, but def. possible :)
I find the idea and almost all approaches terrific!
however, i would have rather chosen the risc-v approach and won a large community for this great idea and then monetized the implementation.
but i respect and admire your persistence!
ivan
Thank you for your support and enthusiasm. The company has done fine over the past year; being already a global virtual company almost nothing changed for us. But it's been a rough year personally for many of us, especially on of the compiler team who spent a month in hospital in Poland an is still not fully back.
About your recent fund-raising experiences: In your VC contacts, were you face-to-face or video? Had you been vaccinated?
Personally I'm in a high-risk group, and more than a little paranoid about the situation here in the US.
mmeyerlein
i can reassure you. we had the meetings and the signatures all done remotely, because it was in the height of the pandemic or at a time where no one knew exactly what was going on. in the meantime i've been vaccinated, but even now the board meetings are all remote. but that will certainly adjust a little again soon :)
as i said, i think the idea is really great, however i'm starting to get a little worried that the competition in the fast lane, with much worse implementations, will race past the mill and it will lose its usp. processors like the prodigy and the huge community of risc-v are making very big strides forward with their traditional implementations on both important kpi's performance/transistor and performance/power, which will make funding more difficult.
i would find it extremely unfortunate if this really good new approach were to disappear into a drawer as a result....
so get to the computer and present the pitch deck at the vc's! ;)