Reply To: The Belt

If possible after considering NYF, I’d like to see a bit more detail about the FU and slot population on at least one member, probably Gold

I am careful not to announce things; I am not up to speed on the intricate details of filings (fortunately for me). But in the bigger scheme of things, given this next bit, perhaps tracking what Gold looks like today will only hint at tomorrow’s mix.

My hope is that info on this evolution, and motivation for the changes will IMHO give readers some insight about Mill performance and the sorts of trade-off that have been made — and can continue to be made — using MillComputing’s specification and simulation tools.

Yes, although what I really look forward to is you being able to run programs on our simulators for real. I hope we can get that going, hand in hand with public disclosure of the ISA details etc. It obviously must not be allowed to take time from the critical path such as producing hardware, but if we can somehow gain benefit e.g. tool chain testing and defect finding from it, there may be a good cost benefit balance to the exercise.

One thing I’d like to see in the Wiki is a description of the instructions and any constraints they impose

We are working on exactly this. This can be auto-generated from our specification system, and we have someone working towards documenting this. When it can be published on our new public wiki may be held back by NYF considerations, but we are always very keen to get information out sooner rather than later now we’ve started being able to talk about things at all.

Theoretically, the Mill could have a very few operations as its core ISA, with a larger subset emulated with series of the core operation.

Yes! Absolutely.

And the mix of FUs, latencies and dimensions on any particular core can be determined in simulation benchmarking for representative workloads long before HW gets built. We have to be data-driven, not hunch-driven.