Reply To: The Belt

Canedo wrote:

Has anyone made the connection yet between belt machines and queue machines?

From 2004 to 2008 I was part of Prof. Sowa’s lab where we developed the Parallel Queue Processor. We had a similar idea (FIFOs holding operands) with similar objectives: high parallelism, no register renaming, and short instruction set. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1052359
…

That’s very interesting; another architecture using a form of FIFO for operands! Thanks for sharing those links.

One thing I admire about the Mill architecture, as described, is that the behavior of the Belt is prescribed in terms of what it does (programmer’s model) independent of how it’s implemented (in general, or on any given family member.) If I’ve understood from a quick skim, the above-mentioned Parallel Queue Processor’s queues are tied to a particular hardware implementation, namely a ring buffer. A ring buffer would not appear to lend itself to Belt operations like conform() — which permits arbitrary reordering of the belt’s contents.