Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Hard/soft realtime Reply To: Hard/soft realtime

Ivan Godard
Keymaster
Post count: 689

A personal note first – it’s funny for me to be addressed as Doctor Godard. I come from the generation before ubiquitous computers – during my brief and inglorious college career, my well-respected college did not own a computer. Though I have taught computer science at the graduate and post-doc levels, I have never taken a course in the subject and have no degree of any kind. We learned the subject because some co-worker was willing to sit the green kid down in front of a whiteboard and explain how it really worked. I try to do the same today.

Speaking of which, in answer to your question: there is no constraint on the spiller or core speed other than spiller bandwidth. This is true for spilling scratchpad and internal state as well as for spilling belt operands.

About special registers:

There is a suite of specRegs, some always present and some only present in some member configurations. These are internal registers contained in the logic of the core proper and located where they are needed; they are not contained in a register file. Some of these are frame-save, some thread-save, some not saved at all; the spiller does what saving is needed. Some are visible to the rd() and/or wr() operations, and most are visible in the MMIO map. At some point we will have doc on all of them, but we’re a little busy 🙂