Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Pipelining Reply To: Pipelining

Ivan Godard
Keymaster
Post count: 689

What to do when you run out of scratchpad:

The next and final level is “extended scratchpad”, in memory. The extended space is not (at present; some arguments) accessible to load/store, but uses specific spill/fill ops and its own allocator and a stack-like allocation regime. As with regular scratchpad, the extended spill/fill deal with operands, not bytes, and unlike memory but like scratchpad the operands retain their metadata. As a consequence, an extended spill/fill must double-pump the cache datapaths, once to get the operand data and once to get the metadata. Extended is cached normally.

Epilogue:

There are loop bodies where you have loop work that still needs to be done after a while-predicate has determined the that exit should occur. If you want to think about it, the general solution is to cause any data sources in the pipeline after the predicate to produce Nones. However, how to do that depends on the kind of source, some of which are NYF, and all really need pictures to explain what to do. We’re also not sure we have found all the cases yet.

Wiki:

Working to get the ISA Wiki doc mechanically generated from the specs.