Mill Computing, Inc. › Forums › The Mill › Architecture › Optimizing Mill System Design: The view from Low Earth Orbit › Reply To: Optimizing Mill System Design: The view from Low Earth Orbit
Wow! Deep questions. And few answers – but I’ll do my best in no particular order.
The current business model is Intel (or TI if you prefer): mostly a chip vendor, with substantial side businesses in IP, custom, and boards. An ARM-like model is a fall-back option.
We expect to expose our specification and sim tools to the customer base and research community, and quite likely to the public. With those tools and a chunk of NRE and we’ll give you your chip, or build hard macros for use in a chip of your own.
We have no minimax searching tool such as you describe in view. Given customer demand, sure.
Specializer-driven emulation of one Mill on another is possible, but won’t give you the modelling you are looking for: members differ to much is ways not driven by the code. Nothing we can do in the code can make one Mill act like another with half the icache. For accurate modelling you’d need to run our sim on your big Mill; the sim models the non-code differences.
Currently our sum greatly abstracts at the system level. In particular we do not try to model anything across the pins. For example, we simple spec a fixed number of picos for DRAM access, and ignore the variation induced by charging, bank switch, and the like. Similarly we do not model i/o devices, so would be no help in trading memory for i/o.
And all these will no doubt change as the company evolves. In particular, the funders of our next round will have a big say in the answers here.