Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Introduction to the Mill CPU Programming Model Reply To: Introduction to the Mill CPU Programming Model

Will_Edwards
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Post count: 98

There are many types of “efficiency” and you got me thinking about power economy, which is a very important aspect to all this:

There is the opportunity for multi-cycle instructions to fast-path NaRs, and I’m particularly thinking about monsters like multiply… whereas a real multiply takes a lot of power especially for large operand widths and vectors, a NaR can cause a cheap short cicuit so you can make substantial gains in power efficiency with speculation verses the hardware needed to do prediction.